As documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly bans journalistic access, but allowed the crew to film its yearly community-organized cookout. On camera, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for help came from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as 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 very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the excuse that everything is about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”
This interrupted cookout event opens The Alabama Solution, a powerful new film produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production exposes a shockingly broken institution rife with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve situations declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.
Following their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources provided multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:
One activist begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses vision in one eye.
Such brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. As imprisoned witnesses continued to gather evidence, the directors looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The Alabama Solution traces Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the television. However multiple imprisoned observers informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate held only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.
A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”
Following three years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.
The state benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming extent and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system provides $450 million in goods and services to the government annually for almost minimal wages.
Under the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly Black residents deemed unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a day—the same pay scale set by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals work more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.
“They trust me to work in the public, but they refuse me to give me release to get out and go home to my family.”
These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free labor is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated Jarecki.
The Alabama Solution concludes in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding improved treatment in 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile video shows how prison authorities broke the strike in less than two weeks by depriving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.
The protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your state and in the public's behalf.”
From the reported violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see similar situations in the majority of states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.
“This isn’t only one state,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything
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