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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely bans media access, but permitted the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During film, imprisoned men, mostly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help came from overheated, filthy housing units. When Jarecki approached the voices, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a police escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the excuse that everything is about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new film made over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a gallingly corrupt system filled with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. The film documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

After their suddenly terminated Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources provided years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

One activist starts the documentary in five years of isolation as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by guards and loses vision in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned sources continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the official explanation—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the news. But multiple imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a toy knife and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed Davis’s head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

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 not press charges. The officer, who faced numerous individual legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This state profits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively operates as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in products and work to the government each year for virtually no pay.

In the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unfit for the community, make two dollars a day—the identical pay scale set by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they refuse me to grant release to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater public safety risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video reveals how ADOC ended the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and attack participants, and severing communication from organizers.

A National Issue Beyond One State

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in every region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for less than standard pay, “you see similar things in the majority of states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive approach to {everything