🔗 Share this article

As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama prisons, Easterling mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the crew to film its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On film, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a different story surfaced—terrifying assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance came from sweltering, filthy dorms. When the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Years of Abuse

This interrupted barbecue meeting begins the documentary, a stunning new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film exposes a gallingly broken system rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles inmates' tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied years of evidence recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by officers

One activist starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is almost killed by officers and loses sight in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces the victim's mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s version—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. However several imprisoned observers told Ray’s lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of evasion, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the authorities would not press charges. The officer, who had numerous separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—part of the $51m used by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This state benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The Alabama Solution describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in goods and services to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American residents deemed unfit for the community, earn $2 a day—the same pay scale established by the state for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

Such laborers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for better treatment in 2022, led by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage shows how ADOC broke the strike in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the reported violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “you see comparable things in the majority of states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything