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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Like other Alabama correctional institutions, the prison largely bans journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On film, imprisoned men, predominantly Black, danced and smiled to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy housing units. As soon as the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Abuse

That thwarted cookout event opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production exposes a gallingly broken system filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to change situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided years of evidence filmed on illegal mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

One activist starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in filming, he is almost killed by guards and loses sight in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect proof, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative prison authority. She discovers the official explanation—that her son threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. However several incarcerated witnesses told the family's attorney that the inmate held only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following three years of evasion, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who faced numerous separate legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

The government profits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450 million in goods and work to the government annually for almost no pay.

In the system, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unfit for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They labor more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for better treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile video reveals how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by starving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Outside Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in every state and in your name.”

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 frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “you see comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything