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As documentarians the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama prisons, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its yearly community-organized barbecue. On film, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. However off camera, a different story surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to interact with the men without a police chaperone.

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

The Revealing Film Uncovering Years of Neglect

This interrupted cookout meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly broken system rife with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

One activist starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers vision in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the state’s version—that Davis menaced guards with a knife—on the news. But multiple incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that Davis held only a toy knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of evasion, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the authorities would not press charges. Gadson, who had numerous individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Exploitation System

The state profits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in goods and work to the government annually for almost no pay.

Under the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly Black Alabamians deemed unfit for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

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

These workers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how ADOC ended the strike in 11 days by depriving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and beat others, and severing communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Problem Beyond One State

The protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the borders of the region. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in your region and in the public's behalf.”

From the reported violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “you see comparable situations in most states in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not just Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything