🔗 Share this article

When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison largely bans journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized barbecue. During film, incarcerated men, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance came from overheated, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a police escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and safety, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Years of Abuse

That interrupted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly broken institution rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of footage recorded on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

Council starts the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; subsequently in production, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses vision in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated sources persisted to gather evidence, the directors looked into the death of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother learns the official explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the television. But multiple incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

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

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had more than 20 separate legal actions alleging brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Slavery System

The government profits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film details the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system provides $450 million in products and services to the state annually for almost no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unfit for society, earn two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to grant parole to leave and go home to my family.”

These workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this free workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage reveals how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, choking the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A National Issue Outside Alabama

The strike may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of the region. An activist ends the film with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every state and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “you see similar situations in the majority of states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything