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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. During camera, incarcerated men, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. When the director moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the excuse that everything is about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Years of Abuse

This thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a shockingly broken system filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles inmates' herculean struggles, under constant physical threat, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated prison visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on drugs sold by officers

One activist begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly killed by guards and suffers vision in an eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the official version—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the television. But several imprisoned witnesses told Ray’s attorney that the inmate held only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After three years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would not press charges. The officer, who had more than 20 separate legal actions claiming 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 state of Alabama in the past five years to defend staff from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Slavery System

The government benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the alarming extent and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in products and work to the state each year for virtually no pay.

In the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly Black residents deemed unfit for society, earn two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and return to my family.”

These laborers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding improved treatment in 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage reveals how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, choking Council, sending soldiers to threaten and attack others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A National Problem Outside Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. Council ends the film with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see similar situations in most jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything