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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Similar to other Alabama's prisons, the prison mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned men, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the voices, a prison official halted recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

This thwarted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly broken institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It documents inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing danger, to improve situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their suddenly terminated Easterling tour, the directors connected with men inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs distributed by staff

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by guards and suffers sight in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated sources continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the official version—that her son threatened guards with a knife—on the television. But multiple incarcerated witnesses told the family's attorney that Davis held only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following three years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who had numerous individual legal actions alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

The government benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in goods and services to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unfit for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by Alabama for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals work upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and return to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better treatment in 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage shows how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, choking the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and attack participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The National Issue Outside Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. Council ends the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are taking place in every region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar things in most jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not just one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything