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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly bans journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. During camera, incarcerated individuals, predominantly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a different story surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. When the director approached 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 facility that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the excuse that it’s all about security and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Exposing Years of Abuse

That thwarted cookout meeting begins the documentary, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly broken institution rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly terminated prison visit, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied years of evidence filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

Council starts the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost killed by officers and suffers vision in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The Alabama Solution follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother learns the state’s version—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the television. However several incarcerated observers told the family's lawyer that Davis held only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced more than 20 individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—part of the $51m used by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Work: A Modern-Day Exploitation System

This government profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in products and work to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

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

Such laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better conditions in 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to threaten and attack others, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in this state are happening in your state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported violations at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “you see similar things in most jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything