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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the crew to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On film, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

A Revealing Documentary Exposing Decades of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a gallingly broken system filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to improve situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

Council starts the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and loses vision in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned witnesses continued to collect proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the official explanation—that Davis menaced officers with a knife—on the news. But multiple imprisoned witnesses informed the family's attorney that Davis held only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Exploitation System

This government profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450 million in goods and services to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to give me parole to leave and go home to my family.”

These laborers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security risk. “That gives you an idea of how important this free labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, deploying soldiers to threaten and beat others, and severing contact from organizers.

The National Problem Beyond One State

The strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of the region. An activist ends the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in your state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for below standard pay, “one observes similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything