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As documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant scene. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. During camera, incarcerated men, predominantly Black, danced and smiled to live music and religious talks. But off camera, a contrasting narrative surfaced—terrifying beatings, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help came from sweltering, dirty housing units. When the director approached the sounds, a prison official stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Exposing Years of Neglect

This thwarted cookout event begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly broken system filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly ended prison tour, the directors made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer violence
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

One activist begins the film in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; later in filming, he is almost killed by officers and loses sight in one eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. As imprisoned sources persisted to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She discovers the state’s version—that Davis menaced officers with a knife—on the news. But several incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that Davis held only a toy knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four guards regardless.

A guard, an officer, smashed the inmate's head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous individual legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to protect staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

This state benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450 million in products and work to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly Black residents considered unfit for the community, earn two dollars a day—the identical pay scale set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They labor more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

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

Such workers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for improved conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage reveals how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and beat others, and severing contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Outside One State

The protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in every state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for less than minimum wage, “you see comparable things in most states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

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