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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely bans media access, but allowed the crew to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. During camera, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However off camera, a different narrative emerged—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for help came from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Abuse

This interrupted barbecue meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length production reveals a gallingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to improve conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly terminated prison visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

Council begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers sight in one eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. As incarcerated sources continued to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother learns the official version—that Davis menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. However several imprisoned witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the authorities would not press charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51m used by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The state profits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in products and services to the government annually for virtually no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unfit for society, make $2 a day—the same pay scale set by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals labor more than 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant release to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security risk. “That gives you an idea of how important this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved treatment in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The National Problem Outside Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. Council concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable situations in the majority of states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything