🔗 Share this article

As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to other Alabama prisons, the prison mostly prohibits media access, but permitted the crew to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. However off camera, a contrasting story surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and security, because they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

This thwarted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly corrupt system rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

After their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied years of footage recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs sold by officers

One activist begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While incarcerated sources continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. But several incarcerated witnesses told Ray’s attorney that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who had numerous separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Slavery System

This government benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in goods and services to the state each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unfit for society, make $2 a day—the identical pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and go home to my family.”

Such workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved treatment in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video shows how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The National Problem Outside One State

The strike may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. Council ends the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every region and in your name.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “you see similar things in most states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a punitive approach to {everything