🔗 Share this article

When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. During camera, incarcerated men, mostly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. However off camera, a contrasting story surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for assistance came from overheated, dirty dorms. When the director moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That interrupted cookout event opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly corrupt system rife with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents prisoners’ herculean efforts, under constant physical threat, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their abruptly ended prison tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided multiple years of evidence recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs distributed by officers

One activist begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly killed by officers and loses vision in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather proof, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that her son menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. However several incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had numerous individual legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the past five years to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The government benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor system that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in goods and work to the government each year for virtually no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, make $2 a day—the same daily wage rate set by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

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

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a higher security threat. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” stated the director.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding better conditions in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video shows how prison authorities ended the protest in 11 days by starving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Outside One State

This strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and outside the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in your state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable situations in most jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything