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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans journalistic entry, but allowed the crew to film its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly Black, danced and laughed to live music and sermons. But off camera, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. When Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That interrupted barbecue meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly corrupt system filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under constant danger, to improve situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

After their suddenly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

Council begins the documentary in five years of isolation as retribution for his activism; subsequently in production, he is almost killed by guards and suffers vision in an eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the official version—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the television. But several imprisoned witnesses told the family's lawyer that Davis held only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

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

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This state profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in goods and services to the state each year for almost minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned workers, mostly Black residents deemed unfit for society, make $2 a day—the same pay scale established by the state for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to get out and return to my family.”

Such laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding improved conditions in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage shows how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and beat others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A National Problem Beyond One State

The strike may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in your state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “you see similar things in most states in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything