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As documentarians the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited the Easterling facility in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to other Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. During camera, incarcerated men, mostly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But off camera, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. When the director moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and safety, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Revealing Film Uncovering Years of Abuse

That interrupted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length production exposes a gallingly corrupt system rife with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. The film documents prisoners’ herculean efforts, under constant danger, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Conditions

After their suddenly ended Easterling visit, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders supplied years of footage recorded on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

One activist begins the film in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in production, he is almost beaten to death by officers and loses vision in an eye.

The Story of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the official explanation—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the news. However multiple incarcerated witnesses informed the family's attorney that Davis held only a toy knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by four guards anyway.

One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the state would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced more than 20 separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Slavery System

The government benefits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's work initiative, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively operates as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in products and services to the state each year for almost minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unfit for the community, make $2 a day—the identical daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of 12 hours for corporate entities or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and return to my family.”

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this free workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better conditions in October 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by starving inmates en masse, choking Council, deploying soldiers to threaten and beat participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

A National Issue Outside One State

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the state of Alabama. Council ends the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in Alabama are taking place in every state and in the public's behalf.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for less than minimum wage, “you see comparable things in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything