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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling mostly bans journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run cookout. On camera, incarcerated men, predominantly African American, danced and laughed to live music and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. As soon as Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, stating it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They employ the idea that everything is about security and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

The Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

This thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new film produced over six years. Co-directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour production reveals a gallingly corrupt institution filled with unchecked abuse, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. The film chronicles prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly ended prison tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways 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 filming, he is almost killed by guards and suffers vision in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the ADOC. While imprisoned sources continued to gather proof, the filmmakers looked into the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. She discovers the state’s explanation—that her son menaced officers with a knife—on the news. However multiple incarcerated observers informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a plastic knife and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by four officers anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's head off the concrete floor “repeatedly.”

Following three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the state would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced numerous individual lawsuits alleging excessive force, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51m spent by the state of Alabama in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: The Modern-Day Slavery System

The government benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in products and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

In the program, incarcerated workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, make two dollars a day—the same pay scale established by the state for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor more than 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

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

These laborers are statistically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a higher security threat. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this free labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain individuals imprisoned,” stated the director.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike demanding 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 prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and severing communication from organizers.

A National Problem Outside Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. Council concludes the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are happening in your state and in your behalf.”

From the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for less than minimum wage, “one observes similar things in the majority of states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not just Alabama,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything