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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama's prisons, the prison largely bans media entry, but allowed the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. But off camera, a contrasting story surfaced—horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from overheated, dirty dorms. When the director moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Years of Neglect

This thwarted barbecue event opens the documentary, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a gallingly broken system rife with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles inmates' herculean struggles, under constant danger, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly ended prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked floors
• Routine guard beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

Council begins the documentary in five years of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by guards and suffers vision in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

This violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the official explanation—that Davis menaced officers with a knife—on the news. But several incarcerated observers informed Ray’s attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic knife and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced numerous individual lawsuits claiming excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51m used by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This government profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking extent and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in goods and work to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

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

These workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved conditions in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video reveals how prison authorities ended the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and beat others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

A National Problem Outside One State

This strike may have failed, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every region and in your behalf.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s deployment of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in most jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

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