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When documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits media access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. During camera, incarcerated individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. But off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from overheated, filthy housing units. When the director moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

That interrupted cookout event opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly broken institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

After their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided multiple years of footage recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by staff

One activist starts the film in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses sight in one eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources persisted to collect evidence, the directors investigated the death of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the official explanation—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the television. However multiple imprisoned witnesses informed the family's lawyer that Davis held only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who had numerous separate legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the past five years to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Slavery System

This government benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. This program supplies $450 million in goods and work to the state each year for almost no pay.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to give me release to leave and go home to my family.”

Such workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better treatment in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how ADOC ended the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to threaten and attack others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

The National Problem Outside Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in this state are taking place in your state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “you see similar situations in most jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only one state,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything