🔗 Share this article

As documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its yearly community-organized barbecue. During film, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, celebrated and smiled to live music and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, dirty housing units. When Jarecki approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and safety, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This thwarted barbecue meeting begins the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a gallingly corrupt system filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. The film documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly ended Easterling tour, the directors connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided years of evidence filmed on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

One activist begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is nearly killed by guards and loses sight in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses persisted to collect proof, the directors looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the television. However multiple incarcerated observers told the family's lawyer that Davis held only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Slavery System

The government profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work system that effectively functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in products and work to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly African American residents considered unsuitable for the community, make $2 a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to get out and return to my family.”

Such workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better treatment in 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile video shows how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by depriving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and beat others, and severing communication from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

The protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your state and in your name.”

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar situations in most states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not only one state,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything