Uncovering the Shocking Truth Behind the Alabama Prison Facility Mistreatment

When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama prisons, Easterling largely bans media access, but allowed the crew to film its annual community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a different narrative surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a prison official stopped filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

The Stunning Film Uncovering Years of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly broken institution filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film documents inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly terminated prison tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders provided multiple years of footage recorded on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

Council begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses sight in an eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources continued to collect proof, the directors investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. She discovers the official version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the television. However several imprisoned witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a toy knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced numerous individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Work: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This government benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that effectively functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program provides $450m in goods and work to the state annually for virtually no pay.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

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

These laborers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile footage shows how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to threaten and attack others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The National Problem Outside Alabama

The strike may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and outside the state of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every region and in your name.”

Starting with the reported violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “you see similar things in most jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

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