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As filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely bans media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its yearly community-organized barbecue. During film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different story emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. As soon as the director approached the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This thwarted cookout event opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a gallingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly terminated prison tour, the directors connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided multiple years of footage recorded on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular officer violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

Council starts the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by officers and loses vision in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. While incarcerated witnesses continued to collect evidence, the directors looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s version—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. But several imprisoned witnesses told the family's lawyer that Davis held only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

One of them, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After three years of evasion, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who faced numerous separate lawsuits claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation System

The state benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in goods and work to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American residents deemed unfit for society, make $2 a day—the identical pay scale set by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor more than 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to get out and return to my family.”

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile video shows how ADOC broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and outside the borders of the region. Council concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your region and in your name.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar things in the majority of states in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a punitive approach to {everything