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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely bans media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty housing units. When Jarecki approached the voices, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This interrupted barbecue event begins the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length production exposes a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated prison tour, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard violence
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances sold by officers

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers sight in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As incarcerated sources continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the official version—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the news. However several imprisoned observers told Ray’s lawyer that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four guards regardless.

A guard, an officer, stomped the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who had numerous individual legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51 million used by the government in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation System

The state benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the alarming extent and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that effectively functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in goods and services to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unfit for society, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the same pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they refuse me to grant parole to get out and return to my family.”

Such laborers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike calling for better conditions in October 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and beat others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The National Issue Beyond Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of the region. Council ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in every state and in the public's name.”

From the documented violations at the state of 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 less than standard pay, “one observes comparable situations in most jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

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