Revealing the Appalling Reality Behind Alabama's Correctional System Abuses

When filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, the prison largely prohibits media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to record its yearly community-organized barbecue. During camera, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different story emerged—horrific assaults, unreported stabbings, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty housing units. When the director approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the men without a police escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that everything is about safety and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Exposing Decades of Abuse

That thwarted barbecue event opens the documentary, a stunning new film produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a gallingly broken institution filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It documents inmates' herculean struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders provided multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in body bags
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on substances sold by staff

One activist starts the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by guards and loses vision in one eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, standard within the ADOC. While incarcerated sources persisted to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the state’s explanation—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the news. But several imprisoned witnesses informed the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a toy utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

A guard, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following three years of evasion, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who had numerous individual legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Forced Work: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This state benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film details the shocking scope and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a present-day version of historical bondage. The system provides $450m in products and services to the state annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to grant parole to get out and return to my family.”

Such workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding better treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video shows how prison authorities ended the strike in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and beat others, and severing contact from organizers.

A Country-wide Problem Outside Alabama

This protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in every state and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for below minimum wage, “one observes similar things in most jurisdictions in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only Alabama,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything