🔗 Share this article

As filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like other Alabama's prisons, the prison largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different story emerged—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the excuse that it’s all about security and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Revealing Documentary Exposing Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout event begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film produced over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly broken institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It chronicles inmates' tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to change situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly ended prison tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of footage filmed on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked floors
• Routine guard beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

Council begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses vision in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the state’s version—that Davis menaced officers with a knife—on the television. But several incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who had more than 20 separate legal actions alleging brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Slavery System

This state profits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in goods and work to the state annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unfit for the community, earn $2 a day—the same daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they refuse me to give me release to get out and go home to my family.”

Such workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for improved conditions in October 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video shows how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates collectively, choking the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Problem Outside One State

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

From the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes comparable things in most jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything