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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the crew to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. On camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However off camera, a different narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a gallingly broken system rife with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. It documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities

After their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the directors connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

Council starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers sight in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to gather evidence, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s mother, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She discovers the state’s version—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the news. However multiple incarcerated observers told the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers 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 “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: A Contemporary Slavery System

The state benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in goods and work to the government annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unfit for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same pay scale set by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals work upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

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

Such laborers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding improved treatment in 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage shows how ADOC ended the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, choking the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Problem Beyond One State

The protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the state of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in your region and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “you see similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not just Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything