🔗 Share this article

As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, the prison mostly bans journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized barbecue. During camera, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, danced and smiled to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Stunning Documentary Exposing Years of Neglect

This thwarted cookout event begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film reveals a gallingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under constant danger, to improve situations declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

After their suddenly terminated Easterling tour, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and loses sight in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned sources continued to gather evidence, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the state’s version—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. However several incarcerated witnesses informed the family's lawyer that the inmate held only a toy utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had numerous individual lawsuits claiming excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Slavery System

This state profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking extent and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in goods and services to the state annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American residents deemed unfit for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the same pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to leave and return to my family.”

Such laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important 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 remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The Country-wide Problem Beyond One State

The protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the borders of the region. Council ends the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in every region and in your behalf.”

From the documented violations at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see similar things in the majority of states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything