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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison largely prohibits media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During camera, incarcerated individuals, predominantly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from sweltering, filthy dorms. When Jarecki approached the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

This interrupted barbecue event begins the documentary, a stunning new film produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly broken system rife with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to change situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources supplied multiple years of footage filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs distributed by officers

Council begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather proof, the directors investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She learns the state’s explanation—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the television. But multiple imprisoned observers told Ray’s attorney that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following three years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation System

This state profits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450 million in products and services to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

In the system, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unfit for society, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor more than half a day for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to grant parole to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” said the director.

State-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for better treatment in 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video reveals how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, choking the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Beyond Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are taking place in your state and in your behalf.”

Starting with the reported violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything