🔗 Share this article

When filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling largely bans journalistic access, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During camera, imprisoned men, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But off camera, a different story surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. When Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Years of Neglect

This thwarted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly corrupt system filled with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. It documents inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources supplied multiple years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked floors
• Routine officer violence
• Men carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs distributed by officers

Council begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by guards and suffers sight in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources continued to collect proof, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the official version—that her son threatened guards with a knife—on the television. However several incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that Davis held only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After three years of evasion, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who had numerous separate lawsuits claiming excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Labor: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

The state profits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor system that effectively functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in goods and services to the government each year for almost no pay.

In the system, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American residents considered unfit for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to leave and go home to my family.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better treatment in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage shows how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, deploying soldiers to threaten and beat others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The National Problem Beyond One State

The protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and outside the borders of the region. An activist 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.”

From the documented violations at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for below standard pay, “you see comparable things in the majority of states in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything