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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant scene. Like other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans journalistic access, but allowed the crew to film its annual community-organized barbecue. During camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for help were heard from overheated, dirty housing units. When the director approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Years of Abuse

This thwarted barbecue meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new film produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

After their suddenly ended Easterling visit, the directors connected with men inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Men carried out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on substances distributed by officers

Council begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in production, he is nearly killed by officers and loses sight in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned witnesses continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the state’s version—that Davis threatened guards with a knife—on the news. But several incarcerated witnesses informed the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four officers anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the past five years to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This government benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in goods and services to the state annually for virtually no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a day—the identical pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals work upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

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

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a higher security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding better treatment in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video shows how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to threaten and beat participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Issue Outside One State

The strike may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in every state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable things in the majority of states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not just one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything