🔗 Share this article

When documentarians the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a different story surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Exposing Decades of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue event begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over six years. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production reveals a gallingly broken system rife with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film documents inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources provided multiple years of evidence filmed on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs distributed by staff

Council starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses sight in an eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated sources persisted to collect proof, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary traces the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the official explanation—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the television. But several incarcerated observers told Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

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

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

The state benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that effectively functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450 million in products and work to the government each year for almost no pay.

In the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unfit for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by the state for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant release to leave and return to my family.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” said the director.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for better treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage shows how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, choking Council, deploying soldiers to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A National Issue Outside Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. Council ends the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are taking place in your region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable situations in the majority of states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything