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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they witnessed a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Like other Alabama prisons, the prison largely prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the crew to film its annual community-organized cookout. During film, imprisoned men, predominantly African American, danced and smiled to live music and religious talks. However off camera, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for assistance came from sweltering, dirty dorms. When Jarecki approached the voices, a prison official halted filming, stating it was unsafe to interact with the men without a police escort.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, since they don’t want you from understanding what is occurring. These facilities are like black sites.”

The Stunning Film Exposing Years of Neglect

That interrupted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a gallingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. It documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to change conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Uncover Horrific Conditions

Following their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources supplied years of footage filmed on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer violence
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

Council begins the documentary in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is nearly beaten to death by officers and loses vision in one eye.

A Story of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to gather proof, the directors looked into the killing of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother discovers the official version—that her son threatened guards with a knife—on the television. But multiple imprisoned observers told the family's lawyer that Davis wielded only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers anyway.

One of them, an officer, stomped the inmate's head off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” attorney general a state official, who told her that the authorities would not press charges. Gadson, who had more than 20 separate legal actions alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Slavery Scheme

The government benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the alarming scope and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a modern-day version of historical bondage. This program supplies $450 million in goods and work to the state each year for virtually minimal wages.

Under the system, incarcerated laborers, overwhelmingly Black residents considered unsuitable for society, make two dollars a day—the identical daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to work in the community, but they refuse me to grant release to leave 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 greater security risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to keep individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary culminates in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for improved treatment in October 2022, led by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone footage shows how prison authorities ended the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, choking the leader, deploying personnel to threaten and attack participants, and severing communication from organizers.

The Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

This protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and outside the state of Alabama. An activist ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every region and in your name.”

Starting with the reported 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 frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “one observes comparable situations in most jurisdictions in the country,” noted Jarecki.

“This is not only one state,” added the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything