Revealing the Shocking Truth Within Alabama's Correctional Facility Mistreatment

When filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the crew to film its annual community-organized barbecue. On camera, imprisoned men, mostly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different story emerged—horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for help came from sweltering, filthy housing units. When Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Years of Neglect

That interrupted barbecue event begins the documentary, a stunning new film produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly corrupt system rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film documents prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

After their suddenly terminated prison visit, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Routine guard beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses sight in an eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses persisted to collect proof, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She learns the official explanation—that her son menaced guards with a weapon—on the news. However several incarcerated witnesses informed the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed the inmate's head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Exploitation System

The government profits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in products and services to the government annually for virtually no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unfit for society, earn two dollars a day—the same pay scale established by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals work more than half a day for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they refuse me to grant parole to leave and go home to my family.”

Such laborers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved conditions in October 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile video shows how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

The strike may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and outside the borders of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every state and in your name.”

From the reported violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything