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As filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling largely bans media access, but permitted the crew to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. During camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, danced and smiled to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help came from sweltering, dirty housing units. When the director approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This interrupted barbecue meeting begins the documentary, a powerful new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly corrupt system filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to change situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Routine officer beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs distributed by staff

Council begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses sight in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She discovers the state’s version—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the television. But multiple imprisoned witnesses told Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a plastic knife and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

One of them, an officer, smashed the inmate's head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who had numerous individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The state benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the alarming extent and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450m in goods and services to the government annually for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black residents considered unfit for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to grant release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security risk. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved conditions in 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage reveals how ADOC broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, deploying soldiers to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

A National Issue Outside One State

The strike may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your region and in the public's name.”

From the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar things in the majority of states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything