🔗 Share this article

When documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama prisons, the prison mostly bans media entry, but permitted the crew to record its annual community-organized barbecue. On film, imprisoned men, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. However off camera, a different story emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This interrupted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a gallingly broken institution filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under constant danger, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly ended prison visit, the directors connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied years of footage recorded on illegal cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on substances sold by staff

Council begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses sight in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses continued to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the state’s version—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the news. But several incarcerated observers informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

A guard, an officer, smashed Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Slavery System

The government profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in products and work to the state annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unfit for society, make $2 a day—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security threat. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” said the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding better treatment in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile footage reveals how prison authorities ended the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The Country-wide Problem Outside One State

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in this state are happening in every region and in your behalf.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

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