🔗 Share this article

As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic access, but allowed the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. During film, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about safety and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Exposing Years of Abuse

This interrupted barbecue event begins the documentary, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly corrupt institution rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film documents inmates' herculean struggles, under constant danger, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly ended prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources provided multiple years of evidence filmed on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

Council begins the film in five years of isolation as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and loses sight in an eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned sources persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She discovers the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the television. However multiple incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate held only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by four officers anyway.

One of them, an officer, stomped Davis’s skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced numerous individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51 million spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

The government benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that effectively functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in goods and services to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American residents deemed unsuitable for the community, make $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They labor more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to get out and return to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better treatment in October 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone video reveals how prison authorities broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Problem Outside One State

This protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the state of the region. Council ends the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your state and in your name.”

From the reported violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes comparable situations in the majority of states in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t just one state,” said the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything