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When documentarians the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans media entry, but allowed the crew to film its annual community-organized barbecue. During camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help came from overheated, filthy dorms. When the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

That thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new film produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly corrupt system filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents inmates' tremendous efforts, under constant danger, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided multiple years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

One activist starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by officers and suffers vision in an eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated sources persisted to collect evidence, the directors looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the official version—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the news. But multiple incarcerated observers told the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

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

After three years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who faced numerous individual legal actions alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Modern-Day Slavery System

The state profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking extent and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in goods and services to the state each year for almost no pay.

In the system, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, make $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

Such workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an idea of how important this free workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better conditions in 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone footage shows how prison authorities ended the strike in 11 days by starving inmates collectively, choking Council, deploying personnel to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

The strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and beyond 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 your state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar things in the majority of states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything