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As filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama prisons, the prison mostly prohibits media entry, but allowed the crew to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. During film, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. But off camera, a different narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from overheated, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That thwarted barbecue event opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly corrupt system rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under constant danger, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly ended Easterling tour, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine officer violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

One activist begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned sources persisted to gather proof, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. But multiple incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After years of evasion, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Exploitation System

This state profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The film describes 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 historical bondage. This program supplies $450 million in goods and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American residents considered unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a day—the same pay scale established by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me release to get out and return to my family.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this free labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better conditions in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile video shows how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

A National Problem Outside Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the state of the region. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in your state and in the public's name.”

From the documented violations at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “you see similar things in most jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything