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As documentarians the directors and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the crew to record its yearly community-organized barbecue. During camera, incarcerated men, mostly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a contrasting story emerged—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from overheated, dirty dorms. When the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was unsafe 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 it’s all about safety and security, because they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Years of Neglect

That interrupted barbecue meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length production reveals a gallingly broken institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles inmates' tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their abruptly ended prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided multiple years of evidence recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

Council begins the documentary in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers vision in an eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned witnesses continued to gather evidence, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the state’s explanation—that her son threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. But several incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that the inmate held only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

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

Following three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Slavery System

This government benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work system that effectively operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. This program supplies $450 million in goods and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

Under the system, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black residents deemed unsuitable for society, earn $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and return to my family.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved treatment in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, choking Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Outside Alabama

This strike may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in this state are taking place in your region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “one observes comparable things in most states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a punitive approach to {everything