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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like other Alabama's prisons, the prison mostly bans journalistic access, but permitted the crew to record its yearly community-organized cookout. During film, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But off camera, a different narrative emerged—horrific assaults, hidden violent attacks, and unimaginable violence concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the idea that it’s all about security and security, since they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

The Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This thwarted barbecue meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production exposes a shockingly corrupt system filled with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under ongoing danger, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Ghastly Conditions

Following their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of footage filmed on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on drugs distributed by staff

One activist starts the film in five years of isolation as punishment for his organizing; later in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and loses sight in an eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to collect evidence, the directors investigated the killing of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the official version—that her son threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. However multiple incarcerated observers told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by four officers anyway.

A guard, an officer, 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” attorney general Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits claiming excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state covered for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million spent by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Work: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

The government benefits financially from ongoing mass incarceration without oversight. The film details the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in products and services to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, incarcerated workers, mostly African American residents considered unsuitable for society, make $2 a day—the same pay scale established by the state for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They 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.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to give me release to leave and return to my loved ones.”

Such workers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep people imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding better conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video shows how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, sending personnel to intimidate and attack others, and severing communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond Alabama

The protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of the region. Council concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in your region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles wildfires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar situations in most jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything