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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and his co-director visited the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like other Alabama's prisons, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. On camera, incarcerated men, predominantly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. However off camera, a different narrative surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, dirty housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the facility that we were forbidden to see,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are similar to secret locations.”

A Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Neglect

This interrupted barbecue meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a shockingly corrupt system filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It documents inmates' tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to change situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

Following their suddenly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of insiders supplied years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular officer violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on substances sold by staff

One activist begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and loses vision in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Violence and Obfuscation

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. As imprisoned sources continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of an inmate, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. She discovers the official explanation—that her son menaced guards with a weapon—on the news. But several incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

Following three years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file charges. Gadson, who faced numerous separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state covered for his defense costs, 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 misconduct lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

This state profits economically from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The film details the alarming scope and double standard of the ADOC’s labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450m in products and work to the state annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians deemed unsuitable for the community, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. They work more than half a day for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to leave and return to my loved ones.”

Such workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those deemed a greater public safety threat. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep individuals imprisoned,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The documentary culminates in an incredible achievement of organizing: a state-wide prisoners’ work stoppage calling for better conditions in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile video shows how prison authorities broke the protest in 11 days by depriving prisoners en masse, assaulting the leader, sending personnel to intimidate and beat participants, and severing communication from organizers.

A National Problem Beyond Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside the borders of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in Alabama are happening in every region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 imprisoned emergency responders to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below standard pay, “you see comparable situations in most states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive strategy to {everything