Exposing the Shocking Truth Within the Alabama Prison System Mistreatment

When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned men, predominantly Black, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. When Jarecki approached the sounds, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Years of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue meeting begins the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles inmates' herculean struggles, under constant physical threat, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

After their abruptly ended prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

One activist begins the film in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers sight in one eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather proof, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the state’s version—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the television. However several incarcerated observers informed Ray’s attorney that Davis wielded only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed Davis’s head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After three years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had more than 20 individual legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Work: A Contemporary Exploitation System

This state benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively operates as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450 million in products and work to the government annually for virtually no pay.

Under the system, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unfit for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work upwards of half a day 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 labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video shows how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying soldiers to threaten and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The National Problem Beyond Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your region and in your name.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for less than standard pay, “you see similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

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