Exposing the Disturbing Reality Behind Alabama's Correctional Facility Mistreatment
As documentarians the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling largely bans media entry, but allowed the crew to record its yearly community-organized barbecue. During film, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However off camera, a different story emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from overheated, filthy dorms. When the director moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the men without a security chaperone.
“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”
The Stunning Documentary Exposing Years of Neglect
This thwarted barbecue meeting begins The Alabama Solution, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a shockingly broken system rife with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. The film documents inmates' herculean efforts, under constant danger, to change situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.
Secret Recordings Uncover Ghastly Realities
After their abruptly ended prison visit, the directors connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied multiple years of footage filmed on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:
- Rat-infested living spaces
- Heaps of human waste
- Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
- Regular guard violence
- Men removed out in body bags
- Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs sold by staff
One activist begins the film in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in an eye.
The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation
Such violence is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary traces the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the official explanation—that Davis menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. However several imprisoned witnesses told the family's lawyer that the inmate held only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.
A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”
After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had numerous separate legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51 million spent by the government in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing claims.
Forced Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme
This government benefits economically from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in products and services to the government annually for almost minimal wages.
In the system, imprisoned workers, mostly African American residents deemed unsuitable for the community, make $2 a day—the same pay scale established by the state 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 state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.
“They trust 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 laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a higher security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this free labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.
State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle
The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, sending personnel to threaten and attack others, and severing communication from organizers.
A National Issue Beyond One State
This strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of the region. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in your region and in your name.”
Starting with the documented abuses at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for below standard pay, “you see similar things in the majority of states in the union,” noted Jarecki.
“This is not only one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything
