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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic access, but allowed the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized barbecue. During camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, danced and laughed to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different story emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. As soon as the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to interact with the men without a police escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

This interrupted cookout event begins the documentary, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly corrupt system rife with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their suddenly ended prison visit, the directors connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine guard violence
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

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

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned sources continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the state’s version—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the television. But several incarcerated observers informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate held only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

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

Following three years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced numerous separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This state benefits financially from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450 million in goods and services to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, earn two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by Alabama for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they refuse me to give me release to leave and go home to my family.”

These workers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security threat. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The documentary concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video reveals how prison authorities broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, choking the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The National Problem Beyond One State

The strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. Council concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every region and in the public's behalf.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything