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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. On film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly African American, danced and laughed to live music and sermons. But off camera, a different narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from sweltering, filthy dorms. When the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about security and safety, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This thwarted cookout event opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a shockingly broken system rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It documents inmates' herculean struggles, under constant physical threat, to change conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly ended Easterling visit, the directors connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular guard violence
• Men removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs distributed by officers

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by officers and loses vision in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses continued to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother discovers the official version—that Davis menaced guards with a knife—on the news. However several imprisoned observers informed the family's lawyer that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four guards regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Exploitation System

The state profits economically from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work system that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in goods and services to the state each year for almost no pay.

In the system, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the same pay scale set by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

These laborers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved treatment in 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how prison authorities broke the strike in less than two weeks by depriving inmates en masse, choking the leader, sending personnel to threaten and beat participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The National Issue Beyond Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and outside the borders of the region. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every state and in the public's name.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in the majority of states in the union,” said Jarecki.

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