As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the crew to film its annual community-organized barbecue. During camera, imprisoned men, mostly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and sermons. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for help came from overheated, dirty dorms. When the director approached the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security escort.
“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about safety and safety, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like black sites.”
A Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Neglect
This thwarted cookout event opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a gallingly broken system filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under constant danger, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.
Secret Recordings Uncover Ghastly Realities
After their abruptly ended prison tour, the directors connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:
- Rat-infested living spaces
- Piles of excrement
- Rotting meals and blood-streaked floors
- Routine guard beatings
- Men carried out in body bags
- Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by officers
Council starts the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; later in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers sight in one eye.
A Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation
This violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated sources continued to collect proof, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the official version—that Davis threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. However multiple imprisoned observers informed Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy utensil and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.
A guard, an officer, stomped Davis’s head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”
After years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct lawsuits.
Compulsory Labor: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme
This government benefits economically from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450 million in goods and work to the government annually for virtually no pay.
In the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.
“They trust me to work in the community, but they refuse me to give me release to leave and return to my family.”
These laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” said the director.
State-wide Protest and Continued Fight
The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding better conditions in October 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage shows how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by starving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and beat participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.
The Country-wide Problem Beyond Alabama
This strike may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. Council concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in this state are taking place in every state and in the public's behalf.”
From the reported abuses 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 frontlines of the LA wildfires for below minimum wage, “you see similar things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” noted Jarecki.
“This is not only one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a retributive approach to {everything
