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As filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic access, but allowed the crew to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated individuals, predominantly African American, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy housing units. As soon as the director approached the voices, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This thwarted barbecue meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new film produced over six years. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a shockingly broken system rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. The film documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

Council begins the film in five years of isolation as retribution for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by guards and loses sight in one eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This violence is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. While incarcerated sources continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother learns the official explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. But several incarcerated witnesses informed the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

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

After three years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who had numerous separate legal actions alleging brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m used by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Slavery System

This state profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the shocking extent and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in products and services to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, 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 return to my loved ones.”

Such workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater security risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved conditions in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone video shows how prison authorities ended the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to threaten and attack others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

The National Issue Outside One State

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

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “you see similar situations in the majority of states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not just one state,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything