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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama's prisons, the prison mostly bans journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized cookout. During camera, incarcerated men, predominantly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a different narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official halted recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and security, because they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This interrupted cookout meeting begins the documentary, a stunning new film produced over six years. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly broken system filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to change conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources supplied years of evidence filmed on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

Council starts the film in five years of isolation as retribution for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and loses vision in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated sources persisted to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the official version—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the news. But several incarcerated observers informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate held only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

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

After three years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who faced numerous separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Exploitation System

The government benefits economically from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450m in goods and services to the state annually for almost no pay.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work upwards of half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

Such workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for improved treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage shows how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving inmates en masse, choking Council, sending soldiers to threaten and attack others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A National Issue Beyond Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in your region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in most jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

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