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As documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling largely prohibits media access, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. On film, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different story emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. When the director approached the voices, a prison official halted recording, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a security escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly corrupt system filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the directors connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources supplied years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Routine officer beatings
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs distributed by staff

One activist starts the film in five years of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by officers and loses vision in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

Such violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. As imprisoned witnesses continued to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the official explanation—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. But multiple imprisoned witnesses told Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

This state profits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450m in products and work to the state annually for virtually no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unfit for society, make $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to grant parole to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better conditions in October 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile video reveals how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to threaten and beat others, and severing communication from organizers.

The National Issue Outside One State

This strike may have failed, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in every state and in your name.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see similar things in the majority of states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not just Alabama,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything