🔗 Share this article

When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the crew to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, danced and smiled to live music and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty dorms. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official halted filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

That interrupted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly broken institution rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. The film documents inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly ended 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 insiders provided multiple years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Men removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in filming, he is almost killed by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses continued to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the television. But multiple incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that Davis held only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

A guard, an officer, smashed Davis’s head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following three years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who had more than 20 separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Slavery System

The government profits economically from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in products and work to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned workers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unfit for society, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the same pay scale established by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to give me parole to get out and return to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for improved conditions in October 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone footage shows how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, choking the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and beat participants, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Issue Beyond Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “you see similar things in the majority of states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything