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When documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. During camera, imprisoned men, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help came from sweltering, dirty housing units. When Jarecki approached the voices, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and safety, because they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

That interrupted barbecue meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production reveals a shockingly broken institution rife with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

One activist starts the documentary in five years of isolation as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by guards and suffers sight in an eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect proof, the directors investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the state’s version—that Davis menaced guards with a knife—on the television. But multiple imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Slavery System

This government profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system provides $450 million in goods and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

In the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly Black residents deemed unsuitable for society, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the same pay scale established by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals work upwards of 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to get out and return to my family.”

Such workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a greater security risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, choking Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and beat participants, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A National Problem Beyond One State

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

From the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable situations in most jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything