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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly bans journalistic entry, but allowed the crew to record its annual community-organized barbecue. During film, imprisoned men, mostly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. However off camera, a contrasting story emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. When Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and safety, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Years of Neglect

That thwarted cookout event begins the documentary, a powerful new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length production reveals a gallingly broken system filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Men removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on substances sold by officers

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

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned sources continued to collect proof, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother discovers the official version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the television. But multiple imprisoned observers told Ray’s attorney that the inmate held only a toy utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

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

After years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced numerous separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

The government profits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that effectively functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in products and services to the state each year for almost no pay.

In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American residents considered unfit for the community, earn $2 a day—the same pay scale set by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to get out and go home to my family.”

These workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible achievement of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video shows how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, choking Council, deploying soldiers to threaten and attack participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

A National Problem Outside Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and outside the borders of the region. An activist ends the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in your state and in the public's name.”

From the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar things in most states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only one state,” said the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything