🔗 Share this article

As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans media entry, but allowed the crew to film its yearly community-organized cookout. On film, imprisoned men, predominantly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. However off camera, a contrasting story emerged—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as the director approached the sounds, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about safety and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Exposing Decades of Abuse

That thwarted cookout event opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant danger, to improve situations declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Realities

Following their abruptly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied years of footage filmed on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine officer violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on substances distributed by staff

One activist begins the film in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is nearly killed by officers and loses vision in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. As imprisoned sources persisted to collect proof, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s version—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the news. But several incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

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

Following three years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who told her that the authorities would not press charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51m spent by the government in the past five years to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

The state benefits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-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 African American residents deemed unfit for the community, make $2 a day—the identical pay scale set by the state for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

These workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” said the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an incredible feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding improved conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video shows how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, choking the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

A National Problem Outside One State

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in your state and in the public's name.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable situations in most states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” added Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything