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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly bans journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. During film, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. However off camera, a different story emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that it’s all about security and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue meeting begins the documentary, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a gallingly broken institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to change situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly ended prison visit, the directors connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Men removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs distributed by staff

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

The Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the news. But several incarcerated witnesses informed the family's lawyer that the inmate held only a toy utensil and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would not press charges. Gadson, who faced numerous individual legal actions alleging brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The government profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450 million in products and work to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unfit for society, earn $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate set by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals labor more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater security risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for improved treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage shows how ADOC ended the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, choking the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and severing communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Issue Outside One State

The protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the state of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in this state are happening in every state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported violations 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 wildfires for below standard pay, “you see similar situations in the majority of states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This is not just Alabama,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything