Uncovering this Appalling Reality Within the Alabama Correctional System Mistreatment
As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly bans journalistic entry, but permitted the crew to record its yearly community-organized cookout. During camera, incarcerated individuals, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different story surfaced—terrifying assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. When the director moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the men without a security escort.
“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about safety and security, since they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to black sites.”
The Revealing Film Uncovering Years of Neglect
This thwarted cookout meeting begins the documentary, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production reveals a shockingly broken system rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. The film documents prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change situations declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in 2020.
Covert Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions
After their abruptly ended prison tour, the directors connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:
- Vermin-ridden living spaces
- Heaps of excrement
- Rotting meals and blood-streaked surfaces
- Regular officer beatings
- Men removed out in body bags
- Corridors of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers
One activist starts the film in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; subsequently in production, he is nearly beaten to death by guards and suffers vision in one eye.
The Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy
This violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses continued to gather evidence, the filmmakers looked into the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother learns the official explanation—that her son menaced officers with a weapon—on the television. But several imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a toy knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards regardless.
A guard, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”
Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had numerous separate legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to defend staff from misconduct lawsuits.
Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Slavery System
This state profits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the shocking scope and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor system that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in goods and work to the state each year for almost no pay.
Under the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly African American residents considered unfit for the community, earn $2 a day—the same pay scale set by the state for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.
“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 numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this free labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said Jarecki.
Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle
The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, choking Council, deploying soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and severing contact from organizers.
The Country-wide Issue Beyond One State
The protest may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the state of Alabama. Council concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are happening in every state and in your name.”
From the documented violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than minimum wage, “you see similar things in most states in the country,” said Jarecki.
“This isn’t just Alabama,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything
