Revealing this Shocking Reality Within the Alabama Prison System Mistreatment

When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Like other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits media access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its yearly community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help came from overheated, dirty dorms. When the director approached the voices, a prison official halted recording, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Abuse

This interrupted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly broken system filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under constant danger, to improve conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities

After their suddenly terminated Easterling tour, the directors connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources provided multiple years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

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

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect proof, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the official version—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the television. However multiple incarcerated witnesses told Ray’s attorney that Davis held only a toy knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

A guard, an officer, stomped Davis’s head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. The officer, who faced numerous individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Slavery System

The government profits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the shocking extent and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in goods and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

Under the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unfit for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“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 workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for improved treatment in 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone footage shows how ADOC ended the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, choking the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A National Problem Outside One State

The strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in this state are taking place in every state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable situations in the majority of states in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t just one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything