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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely bans journalistic access, but allowed the crew to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. During camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. However off camera, a different story surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. When the director approached the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Abuse

That interrupted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly corrupt system rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under constant danger, to change conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

After their abruptly ended prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders provided years of evidence recorded on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

Council begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is almost killed by officers and loses vision in one eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources persisted to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother learns the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the television. However multiple incarcerated observers told Ray’s lawyer that Davis wielded only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

The government benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that effectively operates as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in products and work to the state annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the system, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black residents considered unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike calling for better conditions in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile video shows how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, choking the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

A National Issue Beyond One State

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

From the reported violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything