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When documentarians the directors and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but allowed the crew to record its yearly community-organized cookout. On film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting story emerged—terrifying assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help came from overheated, filthy dorms. When the director moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and security, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Neglect

That interrupted barbecue event begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a gallingly broken system filled with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

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

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

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

The Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned sources continued to collect proof, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the official explanation—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the television. However several incarcerated observers informed the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

One of them, an officer, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation System

The government benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in products and services to the government each year for virtually no pay.

Under the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant release to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

Such workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding better treatment in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and beat participants, and cutting off communication from organizers.

A National Issue Outside One State

The strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and outside the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in this state are taking place in every state and in your name.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in most states in the country,” said the filmmaker.

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