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When filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely prohibits media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized cookout. On camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a different narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as the director approached the voices, a prison official halted filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a security escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Abuse

This thwarted barbecue event begins the documentary, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly broken institution filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under constant danger, to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders provided years of evidence filmed on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

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

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. As imprisoned sources persisted to gather evidence, the directors investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis menaced officers with a weapon—on the television. But several incarcerated witnesses told Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits 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 last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Labor: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

The government benefits economically from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor system that effectively operates as a modern-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in goods and services to the state annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American residents considered unfit for society, make $2 a day—the same daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work upwards of half a day for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to give me parole to get out and return to my family.”

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

State-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for better treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video shows how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and attack others, and severing contact from organizers.

The National Problem Outside One State

This protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your state and in your name.”

From the documented violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in the majority of states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only Alabama,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything