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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely bans media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. During film, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a different story emerged—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from overheated, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a prison official halted recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed 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 is occurring. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout event begins the documentary, a stunning new film made over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a gallingly broken institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly terminated prison visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders provided years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on substances sold by officers

One activist begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers sight in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses continued to gather evidence, the directors investigated the death of an inmate, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the state’s version—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the news. But several incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following three years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who faced numerous individual legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the past five years to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation System

This state profits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in goods and services to the government annually for virtually no pay.

Under the system, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly Black residents considered unfit for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they refuse me to give me parole to leave and return to my family.”

Such laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved conditions in 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and beat others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond Alabama

This protest may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your region and in your name.”

From the reported violations at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “you see similar things in most jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only one state,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything