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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans journalistic entry, but allowed the crew to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a different story surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. When Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official halted filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about safety and safety, since they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

That interrupted barbecue event begins the documentary, a stunning new film produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly broken system rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied multiple years of footage recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by officers

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost beaten to death by guards and loses sight in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated sources persisted to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother learns the official explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. But multiple incarcerated witnesses told Ray’s lawyer that Davis wielded only a toy knife and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

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

Following years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had more than 20 individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m spent by the government in the past five years to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Contemporary Slavery System

This state profits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The film describes the shocking extent and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in goods and services to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned laborers, mostly Black residents considered unfit for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They labor more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

Such workers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video reveals how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the state of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in your region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything