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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely prohibits media entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On film, incarcerated men, predominantly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. But off camera, a different story emerged—terrifying beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance came from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, stating it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This interrupted cookout meeting begins the documentary, a powerful new film produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly corrupt system rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents prisoners’ herculean efforts, under constant physical threat, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Routine guard violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses vision in one eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to collect evidence, the directors investigated the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the state’s explanation—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the news. However multiple imprisoned witnesses informed the family's lawyer that Davis held only a toy knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

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

After years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the authorities would not press charges. The officer, who faced numerous individual legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

The state benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the alarming extent and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that effectively functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in products and services to the government annually for virtually no pay.

Under the system, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly Black residents deemed unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a day—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they refuse me to give me release to get out and return to my loved ones.”

Such workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike demanding improved conditions in October 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat others, and severing contact from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

This strike may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your state and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable situations in most states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not just Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything