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As documentarians the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly prohibits media entry, but allowed the crew to film its yearly community-organized cookout. On film, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, danced and laughed to live music and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, dirty housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer halted recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that it’s all about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This thwarted cookout meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided multiple years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

One activist starts the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers sight in one eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the official version—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. However multiple incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that the inmate held only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Exploitation System

The government benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in products and work to the government each year for virtually no pay.

Under the system, incarcerated laborers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a day—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they refuse me to grant release to get out and go home to my family.”

Such laborers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for improved treatment in October 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in 11 days by depriving inmates collectively, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to threaten and attack others, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Problem Beyond Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are taking place in every state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a punitive approach to {everything