🔗 Share this article

When documentarians the directors and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison largely bans journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During film, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help came from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the excuse that it’s all about security and security, because they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

This interrupted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly broken institution filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. It documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to change conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

Following their abruptly ended prison tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders provided multiple years of evidence filmed on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly killed by officers and loses sight in an eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses persisted to collect evidence, the directors investigated the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother discovers the official explanation—that her son menaced guards with a weapon—on the news. But several incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s attorney that Davis held only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After three years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would not press charges. The officer, who had numerous individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This government profits economically from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The film describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a modern-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450 million in goods and work to the government annually for almost no pay.

Under the system, incarcerated workers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and return to my family.”

Such workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater security risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved conditions in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, choking Council, sending soldiers to threaten and beat others, and severing contact from organizers.

The National Issue Beyond Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist ends the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in this state are taking place in your state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “one observes similar situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything