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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama prisons, the prison largely bans media access, but allowed the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated men, predominantly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, dirty housing units. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a prison official halted filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That thwarted barbecue event opens the documentary, a powerful new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly broken system rife with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It documents inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing danger, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly ended prison tour, the directors connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by officers

Council begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses sight in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources continued to gather proof, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s version—that her son threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. But several imprisoned witnesses told Ray’s attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by multiple guards regardless.

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

Following three years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who faced numerous individual lawsuits claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation System

The government profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a modern-day version of historical bondage. The system provides $450 million in goods and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American residents considered unfit for society, earn two dollars a day—the same pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work upwards of half a day for private companies or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

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

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for better treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone footage shows how prison authorities broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to threaten and beat participants, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

The National Problem Outside Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. An activist ends the film with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in this state are happening in every state and in the public's name.”

From the reported violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a punitive approach to {everything