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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Similar to other Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans journalistic entry, but permitted the crew to record its yearly community-organized barbecue. On film, incarcerated men, predominantly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. When the director approached the voices, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and safety, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

This thwarted cookout event begins the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly broken institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles inmates' tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Ghastly Realities

After their suddenly terminated prison tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on drugs distributed by staff

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the official explanation—that Davis menaced officers with a knife—on the television. But multiple imprisoned observers informed Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple officers anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who faced numerous individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

The government benefits economically from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in products and services to the state annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American residents considered unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities 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 don’t trust me to grant release to leave and go home to my family.”

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security threat. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile video reveals how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and beat others, and severing communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the state of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in this state are taking place in your state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable situations in the majority of states in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t just one state,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything