Uncovering the Appalling Truth Within the Alabama Prison Facility Mistreatment

As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During film, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, danced and smiled to live music and religious talks. But off camera, a different story surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy housing units. As soon as the director moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer halted recording, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a police escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that it’s all about security and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This thwarted barbecue event begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly broken institution filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly terminated prison visit, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources provided years of footage filmed on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

Council starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

Such violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources persisted to collect proof, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the state’s version—that her son threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. But several incarcerated observers told Ray’s attorney that the inmate held only a toy utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

One of them, an officer, smashed Davis’s skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Labor: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This state profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in products and services to the government each year for almost no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, earn $2 a day—the identical pay scale set by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

These workers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding better treatment in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone footage shows how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, choking Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Issue Beyond Alabama

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

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “you see similar things in the majority of states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything