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As filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely bans journalistic access, but permitted the crew to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. During film, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from overheated, filthy dorms. When Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official halted recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Film Uncovering Years of Abuse

That thwarted cookout event opens the documentary, a powerful new film produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly corrupt system rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. The film documents prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Realities

After their suddenly 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 group of sources supplied years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

One activist begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated sources continued to gather evidence, the directors investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the official explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. But multiple incarcerated observers told Ray’s attorney that Davis held only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

One of them, an officer, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had more than 20 separate legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Contemporary Slavery System

This state profits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that effectively functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system provides $450 million in products and services to the government each year for virtually no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly Black residents deemed unfit for society, earn two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They labor more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

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

These workers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater security threat. “That gives you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better treatment in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone footage shows how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by starving inmates collectively, choking Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The National Problem Beyond One State

This strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the state of the region. An activist concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “you see comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not just Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything