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When documentarians the directors and his co-director entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama correctional institutions, the prison largely bans journalistic entry, but allowed the crew to film its yearly community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. However off camera, a contrasting story emerged—terrifying assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and safety, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Abuse

That interrupted cookout event begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly broken system filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film documents prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly ended prison tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost killed by guards and loses sight in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated sources continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s mother, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother discovers the official version—that Davis threatened guards with a knife—on the television. However multiple incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

One of them, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who had numerous individual legal actions alleging brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

The government benefits economically from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film details the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in products and services to the state annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

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

Such workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for improved conditions in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video reveals how ADOC ended the strike in 11 days by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to threaten and attack participants, and severing communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Issue Outside Alabama

The protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and beyond the state of the region. Council concludes the film with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your region and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar things in most jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

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