🔗 Share this article

As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling largely bans media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized cookout. During film, imprisoned men, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative emerged—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help came from overheated, dirty housing units. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was unsafe to interact with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious 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 safety and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Abuse

That thwarted cookout event begins the documentary, a stunning new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a gallingly broken system filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under constant danger, to change situations declared “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly ended prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources provided years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

Council begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by officers and loses vision in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned sources continued to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the official explanation—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the television. However multiple incarcerated witnesses informed the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who faced numerous individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m used by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Labor: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

This state benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in goods and services to the government each year for almost no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black residents deemed unsuitable for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work upwards of half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they refuse me to give me release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better conditions in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how ADOC ended the strike in 11 days by depriving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Issue Outside One State

The protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in this state are taking place in your region and in your behalf.”

From the reported violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable things in the majority of states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

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