Exposing the Appalling Reality Behind the Alabama Prison System Abuses

As documentarians the directors and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. On camera, imprisoned men, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. However off camera, a different narrative emerged—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. When the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout meeting begins the documentary, a stunning new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly broken system filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under constant physical threat, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their abruptly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

One activist begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is nearly killed by guards and loses vision in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother discovers the official explanation—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. However multiple incarcerated observers told the family's lawyer that the inmate held only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following three years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who faced numerous individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m spent by the government in the past five years to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This state profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in products and services to the government annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly Black residents deemed unfit for the community, make two dollars a day—the same pay scale established by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor more than half a day for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

Such laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater security threat. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike calling for better conditions in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video reveals how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, sending personnel to threaten and beat participants, and severing contact from organizers.

The National Issue Outside One State

The protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of the region. Council concludes the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for below standard pay, “one observes comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything