🔗 Share this article

When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama prisons, the prison mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. During camera, incarcerated men, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a contrasting narrative surfaced—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty dorms. When the director approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the idea that it’s all about security and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Abuse

That thwarted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a gallingly broken institution filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the directors connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of footage filmed on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

One activist begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s version—that her son menaced guards with a weapon—on the news. But multiple incarcerated witnesses told the family's lawyer that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by four officers anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After three years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, who had numerous separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Labor: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This government benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in products and work to the government annually for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unfit for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the same pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and return to my loved ones.”

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved conditions in October 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile footage reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in 11 days by starving inmates collectively, choking Council, deploying soldiers to threaten and attack others, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Problem Outside Alabama

The strike may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are taking place in every region and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in most states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything