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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits media access, but permitted the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, imprisoned men, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help came from overheated, dirty dorms. When Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official halted filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

The Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a gallingly corrupt system rife with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources provided multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

One activist begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and suffers sight in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated sources continued to collect evidence, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the news. However multiple incarcerated witnesses told Ray’s lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

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

Following three years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who had more than 20 separate legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Exploitation System

This government benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor system that effectively functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in products and services to the government annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unfit for society, earn two dollars a day—the same pay scale established by the state for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to grant parole to leave and go home to my family.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security threat. “That gives you an idea of how important this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved conditions in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, choking the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and beat others, and severing communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Issue Outside Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. Council ends the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are taking place in your state and in your behalf.”

From the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA fires for below standard pay, “one observes similar things in most states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

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