🔗 Share this article

As documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama's prisons, the prison largely prohibits media entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run barbecue. During film, imprisoned men, predominantly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—terrifying assaults, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

This interrupted cookout event opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles inmates' tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied years of footage filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

One activist starts the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is almost killed by officers and loses vision in one eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the official explanation—that her son menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. But multiple imprisoned observers told Ray’s attorney that Davis held only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by four guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, stomped Davis’s skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After three years of evasion, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced numerous separate lawsuits claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51m used by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: The Modern-Day Slavery System

The state profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in goods and work to the government annually for virtually no pay.

In the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly African American residents deemed unsuitable for society, make $2 a day—the same pay scale set by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to leave and go home to my family.”

These laborers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding better conditions in 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

A National Issue Outside Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “you see comparable situations in the majority of states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This is not just one state,” said Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything