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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely prohibits media entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated men, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer halted recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the excuse that it’s all about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

That thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film reveals a gallingly broken institution rife with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders provided years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine guard violence
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

One activist starts the documentary in five years of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost killed by guards and loses vision in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses continued to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother discovers the official explanation—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. But several incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple guards regardless.

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

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who had more than 20 individual legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

The government benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system provides $450 million in goods and services to the government annually for almost no pay.

In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly Black residents considered unsuitable for society, make $2 a day—the identical pay scale established by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They labor more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to get out and return to my family.”

These workers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage shows how prison authorities ended the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, choking Council, deploying personnel to intimidate and attack others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

The National Problem Outside Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's use of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “you see comparable things in the majority of states in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a retributive approach to {everything