Exposing this Disturbing Reality Within the Alabama Correctional System Abuses

When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans media entry, but allowed the crew to record its yearly community-organized cookout. During film, imprisoned men, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped recording, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the idea that everything is about security and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Exposing Years of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue event begins the documentary, a stunning new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly corrupt institution rife with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their suddenly ended prison visit, the directors connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources provided multiple years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs sold by staff

Council begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in production, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother discovers the official version—that Davis menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. But multiple imprisoned observers told Ray’s attorney that Davis held only a toy knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple guards regardless.

A guard, an officer, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following three years of obfuscation, the mother met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Exploitation System

The state profits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a present-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in products and services to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a day—the identical pay scale set by Alabama for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of 12 hours for private companies or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and return to my loved ones.”

Such workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an incredible achievement of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved treatment in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone footage shows how prison authorities ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and attack others, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

The National Problem Outside One State

The strike may have ended, but the lesson 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 taking place 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 use of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything