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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama prisons, Easterling mostly bans journalistic access, but permitted the crew to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. During camera, incarcerated men, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official halted recording, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

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

The Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Abuse

This thwarted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. It chronicles inmates' tremendous efforts, under constant danger, to change situations declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

Council starts the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by officers and loses sight in an eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses continued to collect proof, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the official version—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the news. However several imprisoned observers informed the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced numerous separate legal actions claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51 million spent by the government in the past five years to defend staff from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Labor: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

The government benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work system that effectively functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in goods and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, make $2 a day—the same daily wage rate set by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals work more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater security risk. “That gives you an idea of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding improved conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video shows how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and severing communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

The protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your state and in your name.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below standard pay, “you see similar things in most states in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a retributive approach to {everything