🔗 Share this article

As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely bans media access, but permitted the filmmakers to record its annual community-organized barbecue. During camera, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. However off camera, a different story surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from overheated, dirty housing units. When the director approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about security and safety, because they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

This thwarted 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 exposes a gallingly corrupt system rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. It documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

After their suddenly terminated prison visit, the directors connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders supplied years of footage filmed on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Inmates removed out in body bags
• Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs distributed by officers

Council starts the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his organizing; later in filming, he is almost killed by guards and loses vision in one eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. While incarcerated sources continued to collect proof, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. She discovers the official explanation—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the news. However several incarcerated observers told the family's lawyer that Davis held only a plastic knife and surrendered at once, only to be assaulted by multiple guards anyway.

One of them, an officer, smashed the inmate's head 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 state would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The government benefits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film details the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program supplies $450m in goods and services to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, earn $2 a day—the same daily wage rate established by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they refuse me to grant release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

Such workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Continued Fight

The documentary culminates in an remarkable feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for improved conditions in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video shows how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The National Problem Outside Alabama

The protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and beyond the state of the region. Council ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in every region and in your name.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar things in the majority of states in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t only one state,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything