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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to other Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly prohibits media entry, but allowed the crew to film its annual community-organized barbecue. During film, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. But off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for help came from sweltering, filthy housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the idea that everything is about safety and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Exposing Years of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue event begins the documentary, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. It chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly terminated prison tour, the directors connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders provided years of evidence filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

One activist starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is nearly killed by officers and loses vision in an eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While imprisoned sources persisted to gather evidence, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She discovers the state’s version—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. However several imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that the inmate held only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by four officers anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Labor: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

The state benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in products and services to the state each year for almost no pay.

Under the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

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

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an idea of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of activism: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding improved treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video shows how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, choking the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A National Issue Outside One State

This strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in this state are taking place in your state and in your name.”

From the documented abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “you see similar things in most states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only one state,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything