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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama correctional institutions, the prison largely prohibits journalistic entry, but allowed the crew to record its yearly community-organized cookout. On film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly African American, danced and smiled to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. When the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the idea that everything is about security and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Exposing Years of Abuse

This thwarted cookout event begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

After their abruptly terminated prison tour, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied multiple years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and loses vision in an eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such violence is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. While incarcerated sources continued to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the state’s explanation—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the television. But several incarcerated observers told the family's lawyer that the inmate held only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This state profits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in goods and services to the government annually for almost no pay.

Under the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor more than 12 hours for corporate entities 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 public, but they refuse me to grant release to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher security threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible achievement of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better conditions in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, sending personnel to threaten and beat others, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The National Issue Beyond Alabama

The strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and outside the borders of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every state and in the public's name.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything