Revealing this Shocking Reality Within the Alabama Correctional System Abuses

As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama prisons, the prison mostly bans media entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During film, incarcerated men, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. But off camera, a different narrative surfaced—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. As soon as the director moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed 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 is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Abuse

That thwarted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly corrupt system rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It chronicles inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their suddenly ended Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of footage filmed on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by officers

One activist starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in production, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses vision in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the official explanation—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the news. But multiple imprisoned observers informed Ray’s attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following three years of evasion, the mother met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 individual legal actions alleging brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Slavery System

The government benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work system that effectively operates as a modern-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in products and work to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American residents deemed unsuitable for society, make $2 a day—the identical pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of half a day 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 community, but they refuse me to give me release to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding better conditions in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone video reveals how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, choking the leader, sending personnel to threaten and attack participants, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A National Issue Outside Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below standard pay, “one observes similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything