Exposing the Shocking Truth Behind the Alabama Prison Facility Abuses

As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly bans journalistic entry, but permitted the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, danced and smiled to live music and religious talks. But off camera, a different narrative emerged—horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance came from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections 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, because they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Exposing Years of Abuse

That interrupted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length film reveals a gallingly broken system filled with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under constant danger, to improve conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly terminated Easterling tour, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Men removed out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

Council starts the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned sources persisted to gather proof, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. She learns the state’s explanation—that her son menaced guards with a knife—on the television. However multiple imprisoned witnesses informed the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced numerous separate 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 state of Alabama in the past five years to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Slavery System

This government profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The film details the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450 million in goods and work to the state each year for almost no pay.

In the system, incarcerated workers, mostly Black residents deemed unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 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 executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

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

Such laborers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The Alabama Solution culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better treatment in October 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone video reveals how ADOC broke the strike in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners en masse, choking Council, sending personnel to threaten and beat participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

The protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. Council concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in this state are happening in your state and in the public's name.”

From the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to California’s use of over a thousand imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “you see similar things in the majority of states in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t only one state,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything