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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans journalistic access, but allowed the crew to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. During film, imprisoned men, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. However off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from sweltering, filthy housing units. When the director moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the men without a police escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about security and safety, because they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

That thwarted cookout event opens the documentary, a stunning new film produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly broken institution rife with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly ended Easterling tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied years of footage filmed on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard violence
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs distributed by officers

One activist begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by guards and suffers sight in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned sources persisted to gather proof, the directors looked into the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the state’s version—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the television. However multiple imprisoned witnesses informed the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

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

Following three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced numerous individual lawsuits claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation System

This state benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in goods and services to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, make $2 a day—the same daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better conditions in 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video shows how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and severing contact from organizers.

The National Issue Outside One State

The protest may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are taking place in every region and in the public's behalf.”

From the reported violations at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in most jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only Alabama,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything