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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely bans media entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized barbecue. During film, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help came from sweltering, filthy housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the men without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that it’s all about security and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This thwarted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over six years. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly broken institution rife with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. The film documents prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly terminated prison tour, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders provided years of evidence recorded on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on substances distributed by officers

Council begins the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and suffers sight in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources persisted to gather proof, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the news. However multiple imprisoned observers told the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by multiple guards regardless.

One of them, an officer, smashed the inmate's head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who had numerous separate legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Modern-Day Exploitation System

This state benefits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in goods and work to the state each year for virtually no pay.

In the program, imprisoned workers, mostly Black residents considered unfit for the community, make $2 a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale set by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals labor more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to give me release to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better treatment in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile footage shows how ADOC broke the strike in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, deploying soldiers to threaten and beat participants, and severing communication from strike leaders.

The National Problem Beyond Alabama

This strike may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and outside the state of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in every region 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 over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in the majority of states in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything