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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama prisons, Easterling largely bans media access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. On film, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that it’s all about safety and safety, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new film produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly corrupt system rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their abruptly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources provided multiple years of footage recorded on illegal cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Men removed out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

One activist starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers sight in an eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses continued to collect proof, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the state’s explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a knife—on the news. However multiple imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that Davis held only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

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

After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This government benefits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day version of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in goods and services to the government annually for almost no pay.

In the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, earn two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These laborers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “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 imprisoned,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better conditions in October 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners en masse, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to threaten and beat others, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Outside One State

This protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in every state and in the public's behalf.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything