Revealing the Appalling Truth Within Alabama's Correctional System Abuses

As documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely bans media access, but permitted the crew to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. On film, incarcerated men, predominantly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance came from overheated, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the idea that it’s all about safety and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

This interrupted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new film made over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly broken system filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. It chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied multiple years of footage filmed on illegal mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine guard violence
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; later in filming, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources persisted to collect proof, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the official explanation—that her son threatened guards with a knife—on the news. However several incarcerated witnesses told Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, 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 officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This state profits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450 million in products and work to the government annually for virtually no pay.

Under the system, incarcerated workers, mostly Black residents considered unsuitable for society, earn two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for private companies or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and return to my loved ones.”

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater security threat. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for better treatment in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, sending personnel to threaten and beat participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

A Country-wide Issue Outside One State

The protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in every state and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything