The Alabama Solution is one of the most momentous American documentaries in recent years. It began quite modestly when directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman gained access to an Alabama prison to film a religious revival service. Once inside, however, the inmates told them that the prison had been sanitised for their visit and that if they scratched the surface even a little they would find a world of neglect, torture and murder. For the next six years the directors received contraband footage from a network of prisoners, who provided them with first-hand accounts of the abuse they were receiving at the hands of their guards, and their gradual organisation into one of the most extraordinary strikes in American history. As one of the prisoners puts it, “we got a humanitarian crisis here” and as another puts it, more urgently, “we need help down here…everybody’s life is in danger.” The Alabama Solution therefore belongs to that category of documentary – perhaps the most vital category – in which the directors enter a situation planning to film a discrete event but end up catching something far more volatile. It reminded me of Jennifer Peedom’s 2015 film Sherpa, which started with the modest goal of documenting the lives and aspirations of Nepalese Sherpas, but coincided with a mass death on Everest that saw the Sherpas enter into intensive industrial negotiations with their American clients.

Like Sherpa, the power of The Alabama Solution stems in part from the unexpected access that the directors have to a situation that is normally unavailable. For the prisons of Alabama are, in their own way, as remote as the Himalayas, thanks to a US Supreme Court Ruling that maintains the right of prison wardens to prevent the media from entering facilities. In the digital era that means that cellphones are the ultimate contraband, as the inmates collectively compile images that testify to why these prisons, which are sitting at 200% capacity and are radically understaffed, exhibit the highest overdose, suicide and murder rates in the nation. These contraband cellphones are the next step beyond the call-collect conversations of Serial and form the first stage of the prisoners’ pre-strike organisation, “partipating in social networking,” which is critical when trying to mobilise inmates across a network of fourteen prisons. The first part of the film focuses on the logistics of contraband cellphones, whether it is footage of prison officers distributing them for money (images filmed on contraband cellphones) or the local police’s efforts to block phone reception in the vicinity of Easterling Correctional Facility, the epicentre of the networked prisoner rights push that comes to be known as the Free Alabama Movement.

These cellphones also set the central investigating thrust of the film in motion, when one of the directors’ contacts within the prison alerts them to the case of an inmate, Steven Davis, who is beaten so savagely that he is sent directly to the hospital ICU. When they arrive at the prison all they find is a body bag and from there the question of what happened to Davis haunts the film and propels the Free Alabama Movement. An anonymous corrections officer calls Davis’ parents to confirm that his death was a murder, a whistleblower inmate deliberately avoids traversing isolated parts of the prison without several other inmates by his side and, most chillingly, a prisoner who has a month left on his sentence promises to disclose what happened to Davis when he is released – only to be killed under suspicious circumstances just before he is set to be discharged. This prisoner is coming to the end of a fifteen-year sentence for breaking and entering an unoccupied building, and while some of the other inmates must certainly have committed heinous crimes, it seems equally likely that many of them have been given sentences that far outweigh their criminal actions.

Over the course of the film, Jarecki and Kaufman alternate between their own investigation into Davis’ death and the footage that the prisoners compile on a plethora of YouTube and Instagram accounts – and this footage is extraordinary, redolent of a World War II concentration camp rather than what we would think of as a bureaucratic institution of the United States. While there is no shortage of brutality – a man living beneath a table, a drug addict sprawled on the floor, people suspended in agonised poses between life and death – the eeriest scenes are of the prison as a precariously understaffed workplace, a zone of massive voids, almost like a video game, with no sense of oversight. Since the prisons are chronically understaffed and the state has resorted to hiring anyone, it’s a veritable playground for sadists “addicted to physical brutality,” the same kinds of sociopaths who are sometimes drawn to elder care. Beneath and through these empty spaces, you sense a maleficent illbience, the fake transparency of a black ops site – and that’s what this is, a deterretorialised space in the heart of the United States, every bit as “offshore” as Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. This is not just a conceit of the film but the explicit intention of Alabama, who draw on the rhetoric of Civil War secession (“We dare defend our rights”) in their refusal of the Justice Department’s offer to regulate their prisons. As Governor Kay Ivey puts it with stark Confederalism, “An Alabama problem needs an Alabama solution.”

The Alabama Solution thus presents the prison archipelago as a new frontier of Civil Rights, a different kind of segregation, which renews the perennial question of peaceful or violent protest – and leads to an incredible vision of what it means to organise a strike from inside prison walls. A strike is difficult enough to manage and sustain at the best of times, let alone between prisons, or in what leader Robert Earl Council (also known as Kinetik Justice) describes as “the plantation,” so it is here that building networks through cellphones becomes a major asset. What ensues is one of the great strike films, comparable to Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA, a film that decisively places the industrial back in prison-industrial complex. The pivotal moment is one of class consciousness, in which the inmates of Easterling, and then the wider network, recognise their labour power and the economic centrality of the for-profit prison system that leases them out for unpaid government work, including on the garden of Kay Ivey’s mansion. By sharing footage and narratives, they conceive a political economy of the prison and realise that the state can’t function without their unpaid labour: “People in here are starting to see we’ve been thrown inside a slave camp where we’re being told “You need to work for us for free until you die.” That they manage to maintain the strike for three weeks is nothing short of extraordinary – and it is fascinating to see the successive stages of the government response: withholding food (“birdfeeding”), placing Kinetik Justice in solitary confinement, and bring in a riot squad team in an effort to discredit them by inciting a violent and “counter-productive” response.

There is no easy resolution to the film either. The state breaks the strike, the prisoners return to work, and the future remains unresolved. But the prisoners continue planning, while there is something optimistic in the film’s sheer sense of duration. For The Alabama Solution often reminded me of one of the most compelling qualities of such great crime documentaries as The Staircase, Making a Murderer, The Keepers and The Jinx, Jarecki and Kaufman’s masterpiece: it exuded the amount of work that the directors had put into it. This feels like a documentary that was compiled over six years, a documentary in which the directors played the role of fellow travelers to the inmates they were platforming. That doggedness, which is personified by the underdog Civil Rights lawyer who joins the case, gives an oddly hopeful quality to the prisoners as they anticipate another decade of litigation against the state as Ivey continues to redirect money from education to the prison system, and the National Labor Union joins the prisoners to form a proper class action. Scale, patience, endurance, hope – these are the best qualities of the true crime wave of the 2010s, and this film, whose story begins in 2016, levies them in its fight for a better future.