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As documentarians the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans media entry, but permitted the crew to film its annual community-organized barbecue. During film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a different story surfaced—terrifying beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help came from sweltering, filthy dorms. When the director moved toward the voices, a prison official halted recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue event opens the documentary, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly broken system rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the directors connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on substances sold by staff

Council starts the documentary in five years of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and loses vision in one eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the state’s version—that her son threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. But several imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who faced numerous individual legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

This state benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in goods and services to the state each year for virtually no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, mostly Black residents deemed unfit for society, earn two dollars a day—the identical pay scale established by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this free labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved conditions in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile video shows how prison authorities ended the strike in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A National Issue Beyond Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in every region and in your name.”

From the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in the majority of states in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything