🔗 Share this article

When filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During camera, incarcerated men, mostly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a different story surfaced—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance came from overheated, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about safety and safety, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Years of Abuse

This thwarted cookout event begins the documentary, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production reveals a shockingly broken institution filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film documents inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

After their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the directors connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources provided years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer violence
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

One activist begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated sources persisted to gather proof, the directors looked into the death of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary traces the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s version—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the news. However several imprisoned observers told Ray’s lawyer that Davis wielded only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who had more than 20 separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The state benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively operates as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450 million in goods and work to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

In the system, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, make $2 a day—the same pay scale set by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved conditions in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile video reveals how ADOC broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The National Problem Beyond Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the message was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in your state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything