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When documentarians the directors and his co-director entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the crew to record its yearly community-organized barbecue. During film, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, dirty dorms. When the director approached the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and security, because they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

The Revealing Documentary Exposing Decades of Abuse

This interrupted cookout event opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly broken institution filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under constant physical threat, to change situations declared “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their suddenly terminated prison tour, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

One activist begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned sources persisted to collect evidence, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the official version—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. However multiple imprisoned observers informed the family's attorney that the inmate held only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers anyway.

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

After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51 million spent by the government in the past five years to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The state benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that effectively operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in goods and services to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a day—the same pay scale established by Alabama for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and go home to my family.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said the director.

State-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The documentary concludes in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone video reveals how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, choking Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and beat participants, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Problem Outside Alabama

The strike may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in every region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the reported violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

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