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As documentarians the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, the prison mostly bans journalistic entry, but allowed the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. But off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from sweltering, filthy dorms. When the director approached the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This thwarted cookout event opens the documentary, a stunning new film made over six years. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production exposes a gallingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film documents prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their suddenly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers 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 insiders provided years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

Council begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers sight in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While imprisoned sources continued to collect proof, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the official explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. But several incarcerated observers told Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

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

After years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who faced numerous separate legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Slavery System

This government profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in goods and work to the state each year for almost no pay.

In the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for private companies or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to leave and go home to my family.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for improved conditions in October 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video reveals how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, deploying soldiers to threaten and beat others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

This protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. Council ends the film with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in your state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in most states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything