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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama prisons, the prison largely bans media access, but allowed the filmmakers to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and sermons. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from sweltering, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki approached the voices, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Abuse

That thwarted cookout meeting opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a shockingly corrupt system filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It documents prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

One activist starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; subsequently in production, he is almost killed by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. As incarcerated sources persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the state’s version—that Davis menaced guards with a knife—on the news. However several imprisoned observers informed the family's attorney that the inmate held only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

One of them, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

This government benefits economically from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The film describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in products and services to the state annually for virtually no pay.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly Black residents considered unsuitable for society, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by Alabama for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They labor upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me release to get out and return to my family.”

Such laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “That gives you an idea of how important this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike calling for improved conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and severing communication from organizers.

The National Issue Beyond Alabama

The protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your state and in your name.”

From the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “you see similar things in the majority of states in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not just Alabama,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything