🔗 Share this article

As filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely bans journalistic entry, but allowed the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. However off camera, a different narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from overheated, dirty dorms. When the director approached the voices, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the idea that everything is about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

This thwarted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly broken institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources provided years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine officer violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

One activist begins the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in production, he is almost killed by officers and loses vision in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As imprisoned sources persisted to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the official explanation—that her son threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. But multiple imprisoned witnesses informed the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a toy utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would not press charges. Gadson, who faced numerous individual legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Slavery System

The government benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in goods and services to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly Black residents considered unsuitable for the community, make $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They labor more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better conditions in 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video shows how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, choking Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

This protest may have failed, but the message was clear, and outside the borders of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in every region and in your behalf.”

From the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable things in the majority of states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything