Revealing this Appalling Truth Within Alabama's Prison Facility Mistreatment
When filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling largely bans journalistic access, but allowed the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. On film, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a contrasting story emerged—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security escort.
“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”
The Revealing Film Uncovering Years of Neglect
That thwarted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.
Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions
After their abruptly ended prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources provided years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:
- Vermin-ridden living spaces
- Heaps of excrement
- Rotting food and blood-streaked floors
- Routine officer beatings
- Inmates removed out in remains pouches
- Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by officers
One activist starts the film in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; later in filming, he is almost killed by guards and loses vision in one eye.
A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation
Such violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated sources continued to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the official explanation—that her son menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. But several incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four guards regardless.
One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”
After three years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.
Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme
The state benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in products and work to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.
In the program, incarcerated workers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, make two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate set by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. They work more than half a day for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.
“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to get out and go home to my loved ones.”
Such workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a higher security threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.
Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle
The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding better treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video reveals how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying soldiers to intimidate and beat participants, and severing communication from organizers.
A National Issue Outside One State
This protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are happening in every region and in your behalf.”
Starting with the reported abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable things in most states in the country,” said Jarecki.
“This is not only Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything
