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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama prisons, Easterling mostly bans media access, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During film, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from sweltering, dirty dorms. When Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the excuse that it’s all about security and security, because they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Revealing Documentary Exposing Years of Neglect

This thwarted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to change conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

After their abruptly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs distributed by staff

Council begins the documentary in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the state’s explanation—that her son menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. But several incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that Davis held only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

A guard, an officer, stomped Davis’s head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would not press charges. Gadson, who had numerous separate lawsuits claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This state profits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450m in goods and services to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

In the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American residents deemed unfit for society, make two dollars a day—the identical pay scale established by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for private companies or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and return to my family.”

Such workers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video shows how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, choking the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and beat others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

A National Issue Beyond Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the state of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in every region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything