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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama's prisons, the prison mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the crew to record its yearly community-organized barbecue. During film, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty housing units. As soon as the director approached the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and security, because they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

This interrupted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly broken institution rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film documents inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Ghastly Realities

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked floors
• Routine guard violence
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

One activist begins the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his organizing; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. As incarcerated sources persisted to gather evidence, the directors looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother discovers the official explanation—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the television. However multiple imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that the inmate held only a plastic knife and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

A guard, an officer, stomped the inmate's head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced numerous separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: The Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This state benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor system that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in goods and services to the state each year for virtually no pay.

Under the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black residents considered unfit for society, earn two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations 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 get out and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for improved conditions in October 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile video reveals how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, choking Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The National Issue Beyond Alabama

The protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “you see similar situations in most jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

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