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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely prohibits media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized cookout. On film, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But off camera, a different narrative emerged—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. When Jarecki approached the voices, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

This interrupted cookout event begins the documentary, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly terminated prison tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

Council begins the film in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by guards and suffers vision in an eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the state’s version—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. However several incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that Davis held only a toy knife and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

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

Following three years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits claiming excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Labor: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The state profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work system that effectively operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in products and services to the state each year for virtually no pay.

In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unfit for the community, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work 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 labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me release to get out and return to my loved ones.”

Such workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone footage shows how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The National Issue Outside Alabama

The protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in this state are taking place in your state and in your name.”

From the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” added Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything