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When filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the crew to record its yearly community-organized cookout. During film, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, danced and laughed to live music and religious talks. But off camera, a different story surfaced—horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout meeting begins the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production reveals a gallingly broken system filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their suddenly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided multiple years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

One activist starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is nearly killed by officers and loses sight in one eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such violence is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While incarcerated witnesses continued to collect proof, the directors looked into the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the official version—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the television. However multiple incarcerated observers told Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a plastic knife and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

One of them, an officer, stomped Davis’s head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who faced more than 20 individual legal actions alleging brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Exploitation System

The state benefits economically from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day version of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in goods and services to the state annually for almost no pay.

In the system, incarcerated laborers, mostly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by Alabama for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for private companies or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they refuse me to grant release to leave and return to my family.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater security risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible achievement of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding better treatment in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video shows how ADOC broke the strike in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A National Issue Outside One State

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in your region and in the public's name.”

From the documented abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not just Alabama,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything