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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized cookout. On camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from sweltering, dirty housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the idea that everything is about security and safety, because they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly broken system rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. It documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

After their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the directors connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders provided years of evidence 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 remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

One activist starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers vision in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. As imprisoned sources persisted to gather proof, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the state’s explanation—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the television. However several incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s attorney that Davis wielded only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four guards regardless.

A guard, an officer, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: The Modern-Day Slavery System

The state benefits economically from continued imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. This program supplies $450 million in goods and work to the state each year for almost no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a day—the same daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals work more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they refuse me to grant parole to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a greater security risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video shows how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Beyond One State

This protest may have failed, but the message was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in this state are happening in every region and in your name.”

From the documented violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable things in most jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything