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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During camera, imprisoned men, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. But off camera, a different story surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, filthy dorms. When Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official halted recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Years of Abuse

This interrupted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly corrupt institution rife with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It documents prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve situations deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly terminated prison tour, the directors connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied years of footage recorded on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Routine officer violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

One activist starts the film in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is nearly killed by officers and loses vision in an eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. While incarcerated sources continued to collect proof, the directors looked into the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She learns the state’s explanation—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the news. But multiple imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that Davis held only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by multiple guards regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following three years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced numerous individual legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

This government benefits economically from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film details the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in goods and services to the government annually for almost no pay.

In the system, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly African American residents considered unfit for society, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and go home to my family.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for better treatment in October 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone footage shows how prison authorities ended the strike in 11 days by depriving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of the region. An activist ends the film with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not just Alabama,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything