Revealing this Appalling Truth Within Alabama's Prison Facility Mistreatment

When filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, the prison largely bans journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized barbecue. On film, imprisoned individuals, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. But off camera, a contrasting narrative surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a prison official halted filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are like secret locations.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Abuse

That interrupted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a gallingly corrupt institution rife with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film documents inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve situations declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly ended prison visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network 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 floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by officers

Council starts the film in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; subsequently in production, he is almost killed by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned witnesses continued to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The Alabama Solution traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the official explanation—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the news. But multiple imprisoned witnesses informed the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by four officers anyway.

One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

After three years of evasion, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had numerous separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from misconduct lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This government profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The film details the alarming extent and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in products and work to the state each year for almost no pay.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, mostly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater public safety risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding improved conditions in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone footage shows how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by starving inmates collectively, choking Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and severing contact from organizers.

The National Problem Beyond One State

The protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in this state are taking place in every state and in your name.”

Starting with the reported violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for below minimum wage, “you see similar situations in the majority of states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and language, and a punitive approach to {everything