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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, the prison mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the crew to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. On camera, imprisoned men, predominantly Black, danced and laughed to live music and religious talks. But off camera, a different narrative surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, dirty housing units. As soon as the director moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about security and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout event begins the documentary, a stunning new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly broken institution filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It documents prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Ghastly Realities

Following their suddenly ended prison visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

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

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses continued to gather evidence, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the news. However several incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

A guard, an officer, stomped the inmate's skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who faced numerous separate legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51m spent by the government in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

This government benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in products and work to the government annually for almost no pay.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to grant release to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The documentary culminates in an incredible achievement of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved treatment in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how ADOC ended the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to threaten and attack participants, and severing contact from organizers.

A Country-wide Problem Outside One State

The protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of the region. Council ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are taking place in your state and in your name.”

From the documented violations at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable things in the majority of states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not just Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything