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When filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. During film, incarcerated men, mostly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for help were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly corrupt system filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly ended prison tour, the directors connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided multiple years of footage filmed on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

Council begins the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses vision in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

Such violence is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned witnesses continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s version—that Davis threatened guards with a knife—on the television. But multiple imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a toy knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

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

After three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

The government profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a modern-day version of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in products and services to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a day—the identical pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and go home to my family.”

These workers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better conditions in 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners en masse, choking the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and beat participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The National Problem Beyond Alabama

The strike may have failed, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in this state are happening in your region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for below standard pay, “you see comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything