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As documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. When the director moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

This interrupted cookout event opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly corrupt system rife with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. It documents inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied multiple years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

Council starts the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by officers and suffers sight in one eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources persisted to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the state’s version—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the television. But multiple imprisoned witnesses informed the family's lawyer that Davis held only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After three years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51m used by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This government benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in goods and work to the government annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unfit for society, make $2 a day—the same pay scale set by Alabama for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater security threat. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary concludes in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for better conditions in October 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone video reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, deploying soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in every region and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in the majority of states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything