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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Similar to other Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling largely bans journalistic access, but allowed the crew to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. When the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that it’s all about security and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Film Uncovering Years of Abuse

That interrupted cookout event opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly broken institution filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. It documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to improve situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly terminated Easterling tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Routine officer beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses sight in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources persisted to gather evidence, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the official version—that Davis threatened guards with a knife—on the television. However multiple incarcerated observers informed the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 individual legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million used by the government in the past five years to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Exploitation System

This state profits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in goods and work to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American residents deemed unsuitable for society, earn $2 a day—the same daily wage rate set by the state for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant release to get out and go home to my family.”

These workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved conditions in October 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage shows how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, deploying soldiers to threaten and attack others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Problem Outside One State

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are happening in every state and in your behalf.”

From the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This is not just one state,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a retributive approach to {everything