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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman visited Easterling prison in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Like other Alabama correctional institutions, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. During camera, imprisoned men, predominantly Black, danced and smiled to live music and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying beatings, hidden stabbings, and unimaginable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help came from overheated, dirty housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the voices, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a police chaperone.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Stunning Film Uncovering Decades of Abuse

That interrupted cookout event opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly broken institution rife with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It chronicles inmates' tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Ghastly Conditions

After their suddenly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by veteran organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a group of sources supplied years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. The footage is disturbing:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine officer beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

One activist begins the film in half a decade of isolation as punishment for his activism; subsequently in filming, he is almost killed by officers and loses vision in one eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, we learn, standard within the prison system. While imprisoned sources persisted to collect evidence, the directors looked into the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, a family member, as she seeks truth from a recalcitrant prison authority. The mother discovers the official explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a knife—on the television. But several incarcerated observers informed the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by four officers regardless.

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

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the state would decline to file charges. Gadson, who had more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—a portion of the $51 million spent by the state of Alabama in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The government profits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film details the shocking scope and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a present-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450 million in goods and work to the government each year for almost no pay.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly Black residents considered unfit for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same pay scale set by Alabama for imprisoned labor in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor upwards of 12 hours for private companies or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me release to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are statistically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a higher security risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” said Jarecki.

State-wide Protest and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable achievement of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding better treatment in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video reveals how ADOC broke the protest in less than two weeks by starving inmates collectively, choking Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and cutting off contact from organizers.

A Country-wide Issue Beyond One State

This protest may have ended, but the message was clear, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in your region and in the public's behalf.”

From the reported 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 wildfires for below standard pay, “one observes similar situations in most jurisdictions in the country,” said Jarecki.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ policy and language, and a retributive approach to {everything