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When documentarians the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely bans media access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, danced and smiled to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. As soon as the director approached the voices, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about security and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Years of Neglect

This thwarted barbecue meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new film produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly broken institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied years of footage recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs distributed by staff

Council starts the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses vision in an eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated sources persisted to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a knife—on the television. But multiple imprisoned witnesses told Ray’s attorney that the inmate held only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who faced numerous separate legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend staff from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Slavery System

This government benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work system that effectively functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in products and services to the state each year for virtually no pay.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, make $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work more than 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me release to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said the director.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better conditions in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile video reveals how prison authorities ended the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, choking Council, sending soldiers to threaten and beat others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Beyond Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in this state are taking place in your region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “one observes comparable things in most states in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything