🔗 Share this article

When filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful scene. Similar to other Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly bans media access, but allowed the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During camera, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story emerged—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the men without a police escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility 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 understanding what is occurring. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Years of Neglect

That interrupted cookout meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a shockingly broken institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under constant danger, to change situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders provided years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by staff

Council starts the film in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and loses vision in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother learns the official explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the news. However several imprisoned witnesses told the family's lawyer that the inmate held only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four officers anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After three years of evasion, Sandy Ray met 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 brutality, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Exploitation System

This government profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a modern-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in goods and work to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American residents deemed unsuitable for society, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the same pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work upwards of 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me release to leave and go home to my family.”

These workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for improved conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage shows how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates collectively, choking Council, deploying personnel to threaten and attack others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in this state are taking place in your region and in your name.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

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