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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run barbecue. On film, incarcerated men, predominantly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and sermons. However off camera, a different narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty housing units. As soon as the director approached the sounds, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the excuse that everything is about security and safety, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These facilities are like black sites.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Years of Abuse

That thwarted cookout event opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly broken institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under constant danger, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Uncover Horrific Realities

After their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses vision in one eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned witnesses continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She learns the official version—that Davis threatened guards with a knife—on the news. But multiple incarcerated witnesses told Ray’s attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four officers regardless.

One of them, an officer, smashed the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had numerous individual legal actions claiming brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect staff from misconduct claims.

Compulsory Work: The Contemporary Slavery Scheme

This government profits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film describes the shocking extent and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450 million in products and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly African American residents deemed unfit for society, make $2 a day—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to give me release to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this free workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding better treatment in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Contraband cell phone video shows how ADOC ended the protest in less than two weeks by depriving inmates en masse, assaulting the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and beat others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The Country-wide Problem Outside One State

This protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and beyond the state of the region. An activist concludes the film with a plea for change: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are happening in your region and in your name.”

From the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for below standard pay, “you see comparable situations in the majority of jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only one state,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a retributive strategy to {everything