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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans media access, but allowed the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. On film, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a contrasting story emerged—horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a police escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about safety and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout event begins the documentary, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a shockingly broken system filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film documents prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied years of footage filmed on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

Council starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; later in production, he is almost killed by officers and loses vision in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources continued to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the news. However multiple imprisoned observers told the family's attorney that Davis held only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who faced numerous individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect staff from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Contemporary Exploitation System

The state profits economically from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the shocking extent and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in goods and services to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, mostly Black residents considered unfit for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike calling for better treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and severing contact from strike leaders.

A National Problem Beyond Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and outside the state of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in this state are taking place in your state and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for below standard pay, “one observes similar situations in most states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything