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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's prisons, the prison largely bans media access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized cookout. During film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from overheated, dirty dorms. When the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Years of Abuse

That interrupted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a shockingly broken institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Ghastly Realities

After their suddenly ended prison visit, the directors connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources supplied multiple years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine officer violence
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

One activist starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and loses sight in an eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned sources persisted to gather proof, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the state’s explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. However multiple incarcerated witnesses informed the family's attorney that the inmate held only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, who had more than 20 individual legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Forced Labor: A Contemporary Slavery System

The state profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450 million in goods and services to the government annually for almost no pay.

Under the system, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American residents deemed unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a day—the identical pay scale established by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals labor 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 give me parole to get out and go home to my family.”

Such laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved treatment in 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how prison authorities ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates en masse, choking Council, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Issue Outside Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are taking place in your region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “you see comparable things in most jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not only one state,” added the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a punitive approach to {everything