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As documentarians the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic access, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. During film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help came from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about security and safety, because they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Years of Neglect

This thwarted barbecue event opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly broken system filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to improve situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided years of evidence filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular officer violence
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs distributed by staff

Council begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated sources continued to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the official explanation—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the television. However several imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that Davis held only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by four guards anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who had numerous individual legal actions alleging brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This government benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film details the shocking scope and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work system that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in goods and services to the state annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unfit for the community, make $2 a day—the same pay scale set by Alabama for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to leave and go home to my family.”

Such workers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said the director.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding improved conditions in 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, choking Council, sending personnel to intimidate and attack others, and severing communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Issue Outside One State

This strike may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and outside the state of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for less than minimum wage, “you see similar things in the majority of states in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t just one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a retributive approach to {everything