🔗 Share this article

When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Like other Alabama prisons, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. During film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, danced and smiled to live music and sermons. But off camera, a different narrative emerged—horrific assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from overheated, dirty housing units. When Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and security, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Years of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production reveals a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under constant physical threat, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine officer violence
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is nearly killed by guards and loses vision in one eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated sources persisted to gather evidence, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the state’s version—that Davis menaced officers with a weapon—on the television. However several incarcerated observers told Ray’s lawyer that Davis wielded only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

A guard, an officer, stomped Davis’s head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: The Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

The government profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking extent and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in products and work to the government annually for almost no pay.

Under the system, imprisoned workers, mostly Black residents deemed unfit for society, earn two dollars a day—the same pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. 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 local government entities.

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

Such laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved conditions in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage shows how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, choking Council, deploying soldiers to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Problem Beyond Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of the region. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in your region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar things in most jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not just one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything