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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama prisons, the prison mostly bans journalistic access, but permitted the crew to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. During film, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But off camera, a different story emerged—terrifying assaults, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty dorms. When Jarecki approached the voices, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and security, because they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That thwarted barbecue event begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length production reveals a gallingly broken institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film documents inmates' herculean struggles, under constant physical threat, to change situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

One activist begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in filming, he is almost killed by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the television. But several incarcerated observers informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

A guard, an officer, stomped Davis’s head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, who had numerous separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51m used by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Exploitation System

The state profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in products and services to the government annually for virtually minimal wages.

Under the system, incarcerated workers, mostly Black residents considered unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work upwards of half a day for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they refuse me to grant parole to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary culminates in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for improved conditions in 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone footage reveals how ADOC ended the strike in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, choking the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and severing communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

The strike may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in every region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s a prison facility, 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 standard pay, “you see comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything