Exposing the Disturbing Reality Behind the Alabama Prison System Abuses
As documentarians the directors and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly bans media entry, but allowed the crew to record its yearly volunteer-run cookout. During camera, imprisoned individuals, predominantly African American, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different story emerged—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the inmates without a security chaperone.
“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker remembered. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and security, because they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”
A Revealing Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse
That interrupted barbecue meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new film made over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly broken institution filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles inmates' tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.
Covert Footage Reveal Ghastly Realities
Following their abruptly ended prison visit, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources supplied years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:
- Vermin-ridden living spaces
- Heaps of excrement
- Rotting meals and blood-stained surfaces
- Regular officer beatings
- Inmates removed out in body bags
- Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs sold by officers
One activist starts the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his organizing; later in production, he is almost killed by guards and suffers vision in an eye.
The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy
Such brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses continued to gather proof, the directors investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother learns the state’s version—that Davis menaced officers with a weapon—on the news. But multiple incarcerated witnesses informed the family's attorney that the inmate held only a toy utensil and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four guards regardless.
A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's skull off the hard surface “like a basketball.”
Following years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. Gadson, who had more than 20 individual legal actions claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the past five years to defend officers from misconduct lawsuits.
Forced Labor: The Contemporary Slavery System
The government profits financially from continued mass incarceration without supervision. The film details the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450 million in products and work to the state each year for almost no pay.
In the system, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black residents deemed unfit for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of racial segregation. These individuals work upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.
“Authorities allow me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to get out and return to my family.”
Such workers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated Jarecki.
State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle
The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding improved treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage shows how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and beat others, and severing contact from organizers.
The National Problem Beyond Alabama
This protest may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the state of the region. An activist ends the documentary with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your state and in the public's behalf.”
From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in most jurisdictions in the union,” noted Jarecki.
“This is not just Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything
