Revealing this Disturbing Truth Behind Alabama's Prison Facility Mistreatment

As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from overheated, dirty housing units. As soon as the director approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that it’s all about security and security, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

That thwarted cookout event opens the documentary, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly broken institution rife with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under constant danger, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources provided years of footage recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

One activist begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; later in filming, he is nearly killed by officers and loses vision in one eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses continued to collect evidence, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother learns the official explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the news. However several incarcerated observers told the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

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

After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who had numerous separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

The state profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. This program supplies $450 million in goods and work to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unfit for the community, make $2 a day—the identical pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to grant parole to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better treatment in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone footage reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in 11 days by starving inmates collectively, choking the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A Country-wide Problem Outside One State

This strike may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and outside the borders of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in every state and in the public's name.”

From the reported violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” added Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything