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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly cheerful atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama's prisons, Easterling mostly prohibits media entry, but permitted the crew to record its annual community-organized barbecue. On film, incarcerated individuals, predominantly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and sermons. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from overheated, filthy dorms. As soon as Jarecki approached the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to secret locations.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

That thwarted cookout event opens the documentary, a stunning new film produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production reveals a gallingly broken institution filled with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. The film chronicles prisoners’ herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change conditions deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly ended prison tour, the directors made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of sources provided years of evidence filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer beatings
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by officers

One activist begins the documentary in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his organizing; later in production, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses vision in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

This violence is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. While imprisoned sources persisted to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She discovers the state’s version—that her son menaced guards with a weapon—on the television. But multiple incarcerated observers told the family's lawyer that the inmate held only a plastic knife and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

A guard, an officer, stomped Davis’s skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After years of obfuscation, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, who had numerous separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51m used by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: The Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

The state profits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film details the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that effectively functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system provides $450m in products and services to the state each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the system, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for society, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for private companies or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the community, but they refuse me to grant release to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an understanding of how valuable this free workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable achievement of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved conditions in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband mobile video shows how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners collectively, assaulting the leader, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off contact from organizers.

The National Problem Beyond Alabama

This strike may have failed, but the message was clear, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every state and in the public's behalf.”

From the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the LA wildfires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable things in the majority of states in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and language, and a punitive strategy to {everything