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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. But off camera, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Years of Abuse

This thwarted cookout meeting begins the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly corrupt system rife with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. It documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided years of footage filmed on illegal mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine guard violence
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by staff

Council begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by officers and suffers vision in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated sources continued to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the news. But several imprisoned witnesses informed the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic knife and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

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

After three years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This state benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in products and services to the state each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved treatment in 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage shows how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The National Problem Outside Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in your region and in your name.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar situations in the majority of states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything