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“You don’t want you to see the slave work”: A new film goes in Alabama’s prisons | Sundance 2025

FLoors were only some of the humiliating conditions within Alabama State prisons with blood, flooded corridors, flooded corridors and routine strokes by officers.

The Alabama solution, directed by Andrew Jarecki (The Jinx) and Charlotte Kaufman, reports on the inhuman living conditions, forced violence for working and widespread violence against the detained population of the state, as well as occupational, which served as confidential hidden sources were told. The two-hour film, which was made over the course of six years, also documents the long-term efforts of the prisoners to improve the conditions that the US Ministry of Justice is “unconstitutional” in a report from 2020 under constant physical threats from prison management. Despite the federal request after a reform of prisons that Alabama’s prisons are currently operated with a capacity of 200%, the film states with only a third of the required employees. The state’s prisons have the highest murder, drug addiction and deaths in the country.

“This film has a lot to pay attention to. It is difficult to see,” said Jarecki to an astonished, passionate crowd, including the families of the detained Alabamans, at the premiere on Tuesday. “I hope you feel as emotional as we do.”

Jarecki and Kaufman accidentally started the project when Jarecki visited Montgomery, Alabama with his family. There he met a prison chaplain that offered to bring him to an annual revival and a grill in the Easterling correctional facility – the rare event that allows a camera. The Department of Corrections by Alabama (ADOC) is legally allowed to combine journalists access to government institutions, which creates a black box with information in which almost 20,000 people are housed.

Once in Osterling, Jarecki was addressed by imprisoned people – mostly black and brown men – to talk about the poor condition of things in the facility in front of the camera. “This is not suitable for human society,” says one. “You don’t want you to run the slave work inside,” says another. “We are on a humanitarian crisis.” Before Jarecki was forced to end the shooting, the camera records men who ask for help behind bars and had to endure forced heat and dirty conditions.

Soon the inmates turned to the filmmakers via smuggling cases, with whom they documented an incredibly brutal, broken and corrupt system for the use of human labor. Under the leadership of the detainees Melvin “Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun” Ray and Robert Earl “Kinetics Justice”, the network of sources recorded civil servants, unsanitary conditions, with great personal risk. The Council was almost wasted to death in the course of production and lost sight of in one eye. Another source recorded blood smears from the Council’s cell, after being dragged away, was passed out passed out and pulled faachown.

The film has its name from the prescribed reform of the governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey, to a system for an Alabama problem that was sued by the Ministry of Justice in 2020 due to “systematic” violence and abuse. As in Alabama’s tradition, reject federal mandates for civil rights. As the film states, the state has long needed federal interventions for reforms, e.g. Voting practices in the 1960s.

Producer Alex Duran. Photo: Maya Dehlin Spach/Getty Images

According to the inmates and through mobile phone material, the conditions in the state prisons have not taken place since the Ministry of Justice ordered the ADOC for reform in 2020 – 20% of the money for the US $ 100 million from the virus from the educational budget of the state. At the same time, the state’s probation rates fell by 72%. The overwhelming number of probation requests is now rejected.

While inmates documented prison disputes, the Alabama solution also examined Steven Davis’s death, which was killed in Correctional Facility by William E Donaldson in October 2019 over her son, who was beaten beyond recognition. Finally, she hears the state’s explanation in the news: Davis threatened officers with a knife according to the ADOC, which required physical violence in self -defense. But numerous witnesses said lawyers that Davis only exploited a plastic knife that he had thrown away when he said he should lie on the floor. Four officers still beat him; One, Roderick Gadson, defeated Davis with a metal rod and stamped his head from the concrete floor “like a basketball”, according to a source.

After three years of veiling and investigation, the state rejected the excitation costs. Ray’s civil lawsuit for 250,000 US dollars and never admitted misconduct. Gadson, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits for excessive violence, has been promoted twice since then. The state paid for its legal invoices and that of all other officers. According to the film, Alabama has spent 51 million US dollars defending from misconduct complaints in the past five years.

In the meantime, the state reaps the rewards of forced labor. Each year, detained people offer goods and services of $ 450 million of Alabama, be it in 13 prisons or outside of them, since occupants are rented to companies and state projects for what some referred to as modern slave work. A detained man finds the great irony that, although he repeatedly refused probation because he is considered a “threat” for the citizens, but is still familiar that he works in the community, also in the villa of the governor .

“Forced labor is forced in prisons due to these violent conditions,” said Jarecki with a questions and answers after the film’s premiere. Officers “have a big impact on these men”. And yet Ray and Council helped a state strike of the prisoners despite overwhelming chances of winning, which demanded better conditions in October 2022. Although the efforts received national attention, Ivey considered her demands to be “inappropriate”. The film material in the film shows how the ADOC ended the strike by starving prisoners prisoner.

The film focuses on Alabama, but recalls that such exploitation is not just an Alabama problem. “What you see in this film has taken place across the country,” said producer Alex Duran, who was detained in New York for 12 years. For example, the liberal bastion of California recently rejected a ballot that had banned forced prison work, and the state hired 1,100 detained firefighters on the front lines of the fatal blazes of Los Angeles. They were paid between 5.80 and 10.24 US dollars every day – less than minimum wages.

In a recorded message in the premiere, Council and Ray have given a blunt call to action in every state. “You should demand access to the interior of these prisons and to the people who are stored in their name,” said Ray. “We don’t know what could bring tomorrow. But what we know today is that we will give everything we have in the fight for freedom. “

“The Alabama solution is a highlight of 50 years of work” by detained activists, the council told the audience directly when he was surprised by the Limestone Correctional Facility. The council now heads a class action against the ADOC, which, like the lawsuit of the Ministry of Justice, remains in legal disputes.

He thanked the spectators “in the name of the brothers who did not make it who did not live, and in the name of the brothers who contributed and contributed to it.”

“We went as far as possible to show every aspect of life here,” he said. “Here we pass on the baton to you.”

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