Exposing this Shocking Truth Behind the Alabama Correctional Facility Abuses

When documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison largely prohibits media access, but permitted the crew to film its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On film, imprisoned men, mostly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—horrific assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from sweltering, dirty housing units. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that everything is about safety and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Decades of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production reveals a gallingly broken system filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly terminated prison tour, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a network of sources supplied multiple years of footage recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-streaked floors
• Regular guard beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

One activist begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is almost beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in an eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned sources continued to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the official version—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. But several incarcerated witnesses told the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a toy utensil and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had more than 20 individual lawsuits claiming brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This government profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The Alabama Solution details the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially functions as a present-day version of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in products and services to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unfit for society, earn two dollars a day—the identical pay scale established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ strike demanding better conditions in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile footage reveals how ADOC broke the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates collectively, choking Council, sending personnel to intimidate and beat others, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Problem Outside Alabama

The strike may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of the region. Council ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in this state are happening in every region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “one observes comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

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