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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, the prison largely bans media access, but allowed the crew to record its yearly community-organized cookout. On film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a different story emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. When the director moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the men without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Exposing Years of Neglect

This interrupted barbecue event opens the documentary, a powerful new film made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly broken system filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied years of evidence filmed on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

One activist starts the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; subsequently in production, he is almost killed by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the news. But multiple incarcerated observers told Ray’s attorney that the inmate held only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

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

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who faced numerous separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the past five years to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Labor: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This state profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that effectively operates as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program provides $450m in goods and services to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American residents considered unfit for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and return to my family.”

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better treatment in October 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile video shows how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The National Issue Outside Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in every region and in the public's name.”

From the reported violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar things in most states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything