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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, the prison largely bans journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. On film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. However off camera, a different story emerged—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, filthy housing units. When the director moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about security and safety, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production exposes a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Routine officer violence
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men unresponsive on substances distributed by officers

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; later in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and suffers sight in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses persisted to gather evidence, the directors investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She learns the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the news. However several imprisoned observers informed the family's lawyer that the inmate held only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards regardless.

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

Following three years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Slavery System

The state profits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450 million in products and work to the government annually for virtually minimal wages.

Under the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work upwards of half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to get out and go home to my family.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater public safety risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved treatment in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage shows how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to threaten and attack others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Beyond One State

The strike may have failed, but the message was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in every state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar things in most states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything