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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On film, incarcerated men, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a contrasting narrative surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. When Jarecki approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a security escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the idea that everything is about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Abuse

That interrupted cookout meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly corrupt system rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources provided multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard violence
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

One activist begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly killed by guards and loses vision in an eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. While incarcerated sources persisted to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the death of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the official explanation—that her son menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. But several imprisoned observers informed the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

One of them, an officer, stomped Davis’s skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51 million spent by the government in the past five years to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Labor: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

This government profits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450 million in goods and work to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the system, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American residents considered unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a day—the identical pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding improved conditions in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video shows how prison authorities ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

The National Problem Outside Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. Council 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 California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” added the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything