🔗 Share this article

When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant scene. Like other Alabama prisons, the prison largely bans journalistic entry, but allowed the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting story emerged—horrific assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help were heard from overheated, dirty housing units. When Jarecki approached the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about security and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That thwarted cookout meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly corrupt system filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

Council starts the film in five years of isolation as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses continued to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the state’s version—that her son threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. But several imprisoned witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

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

After three years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51m used by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Contemporary Slavery System

The government profits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in products and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

In the system, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American residents considered unfit for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant release to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved conditions in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and attack participants, and severing communication from organizers.

The National Problem Outside One State

The strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the state of the region. Council concludes the film 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 a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything