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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans journalistic access, but permitted the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for help were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as the director approached the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

Council starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in filming, he is almost killed by guards and suffers vision in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to collect proof, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother learns the state’s version—that her son threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. However several imprisoned witnesses told the family's lawyer that Davis wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

A guard, an officer, smashed Davis’s skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following three years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had more than 20 individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51 million used by the government in the past five years to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Exploitation System

The government benefits economically from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in products and work to the government annually for almost no pay.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, mostly African American residents considered unsuitable for society, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work upwards of 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they refuse me to give me release to get out and return to my loved ones.”

Such workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The documentary concludes in an incredible achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved conditions in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage reveals how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by depriving prisoners en masse, choking the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are happening in every region and in the public's name.”

From the reported violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar things in the majority of states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything