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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans journalistic entry, but allowed the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly African American, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a contrasting narrative emerged—horrific assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help came from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

That interrupted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film documents inmates' herculean efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of footage recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

Council begins the film in five years of isolation as retribution for his activism; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by guards and loses sight in an eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated sources persisted to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She learns the official explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. But several imprisoned observers informed the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

One of them, an officer, smashed Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced numerous individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

The government benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in products and services to the state annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a day—the identical pay scale established by the state for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and go home to my family.”

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how ADOC broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Issue Outside One State

This protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in this state are happening in your region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “you see similar situations in most states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not only one state,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything