Uncovering this Disturbing Reality Within the Alabama Prison System Abuses
As documentarians the directors and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits media entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. During camera, incarcerated men, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. However off camera, a different narrative emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security chaperone.
“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”
The Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse
That thwarted cookout event begins the documentary, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a gallingly corrupt system rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.
Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions
After their suddenly ended Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided multiple years of footage recorded on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:
- Rat-infested living spaces
- Piles of excrement
- Rotting meals and blood-streaked surfaces
- Routine guard beatings
- Inmates carried out in body bags
- Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs sold by officers
One activist starts the film in five years of isolation as retribution for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in one eye.
The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation
This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned witnesses continued to collect proof, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother learns the official explanation—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the television. But several imprisoned witnesses informed the family's attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.
One of them, an officer, smashed the inmate's head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”
Following years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million spent by the government in the past five years to defend staff from wrongdoing claims.
Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation System
The government benefits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in goods and work to the state each year for almost no pay.
In the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly African American residents deemed unfit for society, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale set by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.
“They trust me to work in the community, but they don’t trust me to grant 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 considered a higher security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated the director.
State-wide Strike and Continued Struggle
The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike calling for improved conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone footage shows how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, deploying soldiers to threaten and attack others, and severing contact from strike leaders.
The National Issue Beyond One State
This strike may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in your state and in the public's behalf.”
Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “you see similar situations in most jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.
“This is not just Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything
