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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, the prison largely prohibits media entry, but allowed the crew to film its yearly community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, danced and laughed to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. When Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and security, because they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Years of Neglect

This thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It documents inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to change situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources supplied years of evidence recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked floors
• Routine officer violence
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs distributed by officers

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; later in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses vision in one eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned witnesses continued to collect proof, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a knife—on the news. But multiple imprisoned observers told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

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

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million spent by the government in the past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Slavery Scheme

The state profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking extent and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program provides $450m in goods and work to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly African American residents considered unsuitable for society, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale set by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they refuse me to give me parole to get out and return to my family.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage shows how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and beat participants, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Issue Outside One State

The protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the borders of Alabama. An activist ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in every region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything