Uncovering the Disturbing Truth Behind Alabama's Prison Facility Abuses

As filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely bans media entry, but permitted the crew to record its annual community-organized cookout. On camera, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a different story surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from overheated, dirty dorms. When the director moved toward the sounds, a prison official halted filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout meeting begins the documentary, a powerful new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production reveals a gallingly corrupt system rife with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly ended prison visit, the directors connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided multiple years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

Council begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and suffers sight in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses continued to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the official explanation—that her son menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. But multiple incarcerated observers told Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

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

After years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Slavery System

The government profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that effectively functions as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in products and work to the government each year for virtually no pay.

In the program, imprisoned workers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unfit for society, earn $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

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

Such laborers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution concludes in an incredible achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved treatment in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage shows how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Problem Beyond Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of the region. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in your region and in your behalf.”

From the reported violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable situations in most jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not just Alabama,” said the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a retributive approach to {everything