Revealing the Shocking Reality Within the Alabama Correctional Facility Mistreatment

As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized cookout. During film, incarcerated men, predominantly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different story emerged—terrifying assaults, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly corrupt system rife with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied years of evidence filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men unresponsive on substances sold by officers

Council begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers sight in one eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. While imprisoned witnesses continued to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother discovers the official explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the news. But multiple incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that Davis held only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who faced numerous individual lawsuits claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Labor: The Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This state profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor system that effectively functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in products and services to the state annually for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black residents considered unfit for the community, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work upwards of half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

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

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this free workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding better conditions in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the state of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your state and in your name.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable things in most jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not just Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a retributive approach to {everything