🔗 Share this article

As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling largely bans media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. During camera, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a different story surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. When the director approached the voices, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker remembered. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Exposing Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length production reveals a shockingly corrupt system rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided years of evidence recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

Council starts the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by guards and suffers vision in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. While imprisoned witnesses persisted to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the official explanation—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the television. However several imprisoned witnesses told the family's lawyer that Davis held only a plastic knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by four guards anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the state would not press charges. Gadson, who had more than 20 individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid 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 protect staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This government profits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the shocking extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a modern-day version of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in goods and services to the state annually for almost no pay.

Under the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, earn $2 a day—the same daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to leave and go home to my family.”

Such workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage shows how prison authorities ended the protest in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Problem Outside One State

This protest may have failed, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in every state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes comparable situations in most states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything