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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On film, incarcerated men, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—terrifying beatings, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer halted recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the men without a police escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That thwarted cookout meeting begins the documentary, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly broken institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It documents inmates' tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to change situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men unresponsive on substances sold by staff

One activist begins the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and loses sight in one eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses continued to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She learns the official explanation—that Davis menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. But multiple imprisoned observers told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who had numerous individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Labor: The Contemporary Slavery System

This state profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in products and work to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned workers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unfit for the community, make two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to give me release to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding better conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage shows how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, choking Council, deploying personnel to threaten and attack others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A Country-wide Issue Outside Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. Council concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in this state are taking place in every region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the reported violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

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