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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, the prison mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the crew to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. During camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—terrifying assaults, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help came from overheated, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length production reveals a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders provided years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

One activist starts the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by officers and loses vision in one eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned sources persisted to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the news. But multiple incarcerated observers informed the family's attorney that Davis held only a toy knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

One of them, an officer, smashed Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After three years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who faced numerous separate legal actions alleging brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Labor: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The government profits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450 million in products and services to the state each year for almost no pay.

In the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American residents deemed unfit for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by Alabama for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to give me release to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, choking the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and attack participants, and severing communication from organizers.

The National Issue Beyond One State

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every 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 use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in most states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything