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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits media access, but allowed the filmmakers to record its yearly community-organized barbecue. During film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about safety and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That thwarted cookout event opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a gallingly corrupt system rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Conditions

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on substances distributed by officers

One activist starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and loses sight in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated sources persisted to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother discovers the state’s version—that Davis menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. However several imprisoned observers informed the family's lawyer that Davis wielded only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

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

After years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who had more than 20 individual lawsuits claiming excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend staff from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Work: The Modern-Day Slavery System

The state benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in goods and work to the state annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unfit for the community, earn two dollars a day—the same daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than half a day for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to grant parole to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

Such workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better treatment in 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat participants, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Issue Outside Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the borders of the region. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in your state and in your name.”

Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “you see comparable things in most states in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything