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As filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama prisons, the prison mostly bans media access, but permitted the crew to film its annual volunteer-run barbecue. During film, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying assaults, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official halted filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the idea that it’s all about security and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This thwarted cookout event begins the documentary, a powerful new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production reveals a gallingly broken institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

After their suddenly terminated Easterling tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is almost killed by officers and loses sight in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated sources continued to gather evidence, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the state’s version—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. However several imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that Davis held only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced numerous individual legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This state benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450 million in goods and services to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly Black residents deemed unfit for the community, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work more than 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and return to my family.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better treatment in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile footage shows how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and attack others, and severing communication from organizers.

A National Problem Beyond One State

This strike may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in every region and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below standard pay, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything