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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic access, but allowed the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly Black, danced and laughed to live music and sermons. However off camera, a different story surfaced—horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help 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 certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Years of Neglect

That thwarted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly broken institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. It chronicles inmates' tremendous efforts, under constant danger, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly ended prison tour, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders provided years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

Council begins the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost killed by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect proof, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the state’s explanation—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. However multiple imprisoned observers informed the family's attorney that the inmate held only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following three years of evasion, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would not press charges. The officer, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Slavery System

The state profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the alarming extent and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. The system provides $450 million in products and work to the state annually for virtually no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, mostly African American residents considered unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to grant parole to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher security risk. “That gives you an idea of how important this free labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for improved treatment in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners en masse, choking Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

A National Issue Beyond Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are taking place in your state and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar things in the majority of states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything