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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans media access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run barbecue. During film, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, danced and smiled to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story emerged—terrifying beatings, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. When the director approached the voices, a prison official halted recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and security, because they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That interrupted barbecue event opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly corrupt system filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources provided years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on substances distributed by officers

One activist begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and suffers sight in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned witnesses continued to collect proof, the directors investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the official version—that Davis threatened guards with a knife—on the news. However several incarcerated observers informed the family's attorney that Davis held only a plastic knife and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

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

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who had more than 20 individual legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Slavery System

This government profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film describes the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in goods and services to the government each year for virtually no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They labor more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and return to my family.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a higher security risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The documentary culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage shows how ADOC ended the strike in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

A National Issue Beyond One State

The protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are taking place in every state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar things in most states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not just Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything