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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant scene. Like other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic access, but allowed the crew to record its yearly community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a contrasting story emerged—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, filthy housing units. As soon as the director approached the voices, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the idea that everything is about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This interrupted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly broken system filled with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. It chronicles inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to improve situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly terminated prison tour, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources provided years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

One activist begins the documentary in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect proof, the directors investigated the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a knife—on the news. However multiple incarcerated witnesses informed the family's attorney that Davis held only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced numerous separate lawsuits claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

The state benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film details the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. The system provides $450m in products and work to the government annually for virtually no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a day—the same daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated labor 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 executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

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

Such workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security threat. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile footage shows how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The National Issue Outside Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in this state are taking place in every region and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “you see similar situations in most jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything