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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its yearly community-organized cookout. During film, incarcerated men, predominantly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. However off camera, a different story surfaced—terrifying assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and security, because they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue event begins the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length production reveals a shockingly broken system filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It chronicles inmates' tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly terminated prison visit, the directors connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

Council starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the state’s version—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. However multiple imprisoned observers told Ray’s attorney that Davis held only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by multiple officers anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who faced numerous separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Forced Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This state profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450 million in products and work to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American residents deemed unfit for the community, earn $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me release to leave and return to my family.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security threat. “That gives you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike demanding improved treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video shows how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, choking the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and attack participants, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A National Problem Beyond Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and outside the borders of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in every state and in your name.”

From the reported violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything