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As documentarians the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely bans media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. During camera, imprisoned men, mostly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help came from overheated, dirty dorms. As soon as the director approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and safety, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are like secret locations.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This thwarted barbecue event opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a gallingly corrupt system filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It chronicles inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders provided multiple years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by staff

One activist begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses vision in one eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

Such violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s version—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the television. However multiple incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

A guard, an officer, smashed the inmate's head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of evasion, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Exploitation System

The state benefits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450m in goods and services to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unfit for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike calling for improved treatment in October 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage shows how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to threaten and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The National Problem Outside One State

The strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. Council ends the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in every region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable things in most states in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only Alabama,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything