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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Like other Alabama prisons, the prison mostly bans media access, but permitted the crew to record its annual community-organized barbecue. On camera, incarcerated men, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the excuse that everything is about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

The Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This interrupted cookout meeting begins the documentary, a powerful new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Ghastly Realities

After their suddenly terminated Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders provided years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

Council starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly 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 witnesses persisted to gather evidence, the directors investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother learns the official explanation—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the television. But multiple imprisoned observers informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

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

After years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the authorities would not press charges. Gadson, who had numerous individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

The government profits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in products and work to the government annually for virtually no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unfit for society, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the same pay scale set by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals labor more than 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to grant release to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said the director.

State-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved conditions in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage shows how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

This strike may have failed, but the message was evident, and beyond the state of the region. Council concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “you see comparable things in the majority of states in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t just one state,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything