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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the crew to record its annual community-organized barbecue. On camera, imprisoned men, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from overheated, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and security, because they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Abuse

This thwarted barbecue event begins the documentary, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. The film documents prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing danger, to improve situations deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources provided years of footage filmed on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

Council starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; later in filming, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This violence is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. While incarcerated sources continued to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She discovers the official version—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the television. However several incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers anyway.

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

After three years of evasion, the mother met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced numerous separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This government profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in products and work to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

In the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly Black Alabamians deemed unfit for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

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

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

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for improved conditions in 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone footage shows how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, choking the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Issue Beyond Alabama

The strike may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and outside the state of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your state and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable situations in most jurisdictions in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything