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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director 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 permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. On film, imprisoned men, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. But off camera, a different story surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as the director approached the voices, a prison official stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the men without a police escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about security and safety, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Years of Abuse

That interrupted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production reveals a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

After their suddenly ended prison tour, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources provided multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs distributed by officers

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

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated sources continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. However multiple imprisoned observers informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following years of evasion, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

The government benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film describes the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450 million in products and services to the state annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, incarcerated workers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unfit for the community, make $2 a day—the same pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They labor more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a greater security risk. “That gives you an idea of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary 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 cell phone footage shows how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

A National Problem Outside One State

This strike may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in your region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “you see similar situations in most states in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything