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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the crew to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On film, imprisoned men, mostly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However behind the scenes, a contrasting story emerged—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance came from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Film Uncovering Years of Neglect

That interrupted cookout meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production exposes a shockingly broken institution rife with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles inmates' herculean struggles, under constant physical threat, to change situations declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly ended prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources provided multiple years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Men removed out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs distributed by officers

Council begins the film in five years of isolation as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is almost killed by officers and loses sight in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers looked into the death of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She learns the official explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. However several imprisoned observers informed the family's lawyer that Davis held only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

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

Following years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with the state's “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation System

This government profits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the alarming extent and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in products and services to the state annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unfit for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they refuse me to grant parole to leave and go home to my family.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding better conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile video shows how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Beyond Alabama

This strike may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in this state are taking place in every region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in most states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not only one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything