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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the crew to record its yearly community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from overheated, filthy dorms. When the director approached the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

That thwarted cookout event opens the documentary, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length production reveals a gallingly broken institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly ended Easterling tour, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of footage recorded on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

Council begins the film in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; subsequently in production, he is almost killed by officers and loses sight in an eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned witnesses continued to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the official explanation—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. But several incarcerated observers informed the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

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

Following years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The state benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that effectively functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in goods and work to the state annually for almost minimal wages.

In the system, incarcerated workers, mostly African American residents considered unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals work more than half a day for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, 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 grant release to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater public safety risk. “That gives 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 Strike and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for improved conditions in 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage shows how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and beat others, and severing contact from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every region and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable situations in most jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything