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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly bans media access, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized cookout. On camera, incarcerated individuals, predominantly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a contrasting story emerged—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for help were heard from overheated, filthy housing units. As soon as the director approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that it’s all about security and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

The Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production exposes a gallingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the directors connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied multiple years of footage filmed on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

Council begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in an eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. As incarcerated sources persisted to gather evidence, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the state’s version—that Davis menaced officers with a knife—on the television. But several imprisoned observers informed the family's attorney that Davis held only a toy knife and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, stomped the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous separate legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Labor: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

This government profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in products and services to the state annually for virtually minimal wages.

Under the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unfit for the community, earn two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They labor more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

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

Such laborers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for improved treatment in October 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video reveals how prison authorities ended the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and beat participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Issue Outside One State

This strike may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in this state are happening in your state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “you see similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

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