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As documentarians the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans journalistic access, but allowed the crew to film its yearly community-organized cookout. During film, incarcerated men, predominantly Black, danced and smiled to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as the director approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that it’s all about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That interrupted barbecue event opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly broken system rife with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their suddenly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided multiple years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine guard violence
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

Council starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly killed by officers and loses sight in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect evidence, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the official explanation—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the news. However multiple incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that the inmate held only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This government profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively functions as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450 million in products and services to the state annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

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

Such laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved conditions in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A National Problem Outside Alabama

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

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for below standard pay, “one observes similar things in most states in the union,” said Jarecki.

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