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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits media entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. On film, imprisoned men, mostly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a different narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance came from overheated, filthy dorms. When the director moved toward the voices, a prison official halted filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, since they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

This thwarted barbecue event begins the documentary, a stunning new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

After their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the directors connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources provided years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked floors
• Routine guard violence
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

Council begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis menaced officers with a knife—on the television. But multiple imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a toy knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

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

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who had more than 20 individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51 million spent by the government in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Exploitation System

The state benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. The system provides $450m in products and services to the state each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, mostly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate set by the state for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They labor more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and go home to my family.”

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” said the director.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for better treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video reveals how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and attack participants, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Problem Beyond One State

This strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of the region. An activist ends the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every state and in your behalf.”

From the documented violations at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for below standard pay, “one observes comparable situations in most states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything