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As documentarians the directors and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual community-organized cookout. During camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, danced and smiled to live music and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—terrifying assaults, unreported stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from overheated, dirty housing units. When Jarecki approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas 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 don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That thwarted barbecue meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new film produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. It chronicles prisoners’ herculean struggles, under constant danger, to change conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

After their abruptly ended prison tour, the filmmakers connected with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders provided years of evidence filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Routine officer violence
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

Council begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; subsequently in production, he is nearly killed by guards and suffers sight in one eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned witnesses persisted to collect proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s mother, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. She discovers the official explanation—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the news. But several imprisoned witnesses informed the family's lawyer that Davis wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four guards regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed Davis’s head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who had more than 20 separate legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million used by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Labor: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This government profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in goods and services to the government each year for virtually minimal wages.

In the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a 24-hour period—the identical pay scale established by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant parole to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary concludes in an incredible feat of activism: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for improved conditions in 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone footage reveals how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving inmates en masse, choking Council, sending personnel to intimidate and attack participants, and severing communication from strike leaders.

The National Issue Outside One State

The strike may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the borders of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are taking place in every region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s use of 1,100 imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable situations in most jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not only Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a new wave of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything