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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama prisons, the prison mostly prohibits media entry, but allowed the crew to film its annual community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. But off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This thwarted barbecue event begins the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. The film documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Ghastly Realities

After their suddenly ended prison tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

One activist starts the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his activism; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and loses sight in an eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated sources continued to gather evidence, the directors investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the official explanation—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the television. But multiple imprisoned witnesses informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards regardless.

A guard, an officer, stomped the inmate's head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This government benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a present-day version of historical bondage. The system provides $450 million in products and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a day—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

These workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “That gives you an idea of how important this free labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for better conditions in 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to threaten and beat participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Outside Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of the region. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in your region and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for below standard pay, “you see similar things in the majority of states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not just one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything