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When documentarians the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly African American, danced and laughed to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story emerged—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for help came from overheated, filthy dorms. When the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Years of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue event opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It documents inmates' herculean struggles, under constant danger, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their suddenly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied years of footage recorded on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard violence
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on substances distributed by officers

Council begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses vision in one eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned sources persisted 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 documentary traces the victim's mother, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the official explanation—that Davis menaced officers with a knife—on the news. However several incarcerated witnesses told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced numerous individual legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million spent by the government in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Contemporary Slavery System

This government benefits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The film details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450m in goods and work to the state each year for virtually no pay.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a day—the identical pay scale established by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and return to my family.”

Such workers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for better treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone footage shows how ADOC ended the strike in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and beat others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the state of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in every state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes comparable things in most states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not only one state,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything