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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly bans journalistic access, but allowed the crew to film its annual community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a contrasting story emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help came from sweltering, dirty dorms. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and safety, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Years of Abuse

This thwarted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly broken system filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film documents inmates' herculean efforts, under constant danger, to improve conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Horrific Conditions

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

Council starts the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in filming, he is almost killed by officers and loses sight in one eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources persisted to gather proof, the directors looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the news. But multiple imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that the inmate held only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

The government profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in products and work to the government annually for virtually no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, mostly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned 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 governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they refuse me to grant release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for improved treatment in October 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in 11 days by depriving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and beat participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

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