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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Like other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling largely bans media access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized cookout. During camera, incarcerated individuals, predominantly African American, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from overheated, dirty housing units. As soon as the director approached the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the men without a police escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about safety and safety, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

This interrupted cookout event begins the documentary, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a shockingly corrupt system filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to improve conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Realities

Following their suddenly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders provided multiple years of footage recorded on illegal cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs distributed by officers

One activist starts the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by officers and loses vision in one eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned witnesses continued to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that her son menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. However several imprisoned observers informed Ray’s lawyer that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four guards regardless.

One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who faced numerous individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Labor: A Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This state profits economically from continued imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in goods and services to the state annually for almost no pay.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, mostly Black residents deemed unfit for society, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate set by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for improved treatment in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to threaten and beat others, and severing contact from organizers.

A Country-wide Problem Outside One State

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in every state and in your behalf.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only one state,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything