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As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly cheerful scene. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits journalistic access, but permitted the filmmakers to film its annual volunteer-run cookout. On film, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, danced and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a contrasting narrative surfaced—horrific beatings, hidden stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance were heard from sweltering, filthy housing units. When Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer stopped filming, stating it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about security and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

A Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue event opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over half a decade. Co-directed by the director and Kaufman, the feature-length film exposes a shockingly broken institution rife with unregulated mistreatment, compulsory work, and unimaginable cruelty. It documents inmates' herculean efforts, under ongoing danger, to change situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly terminated prison visit, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a network of insiders provided multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-streaked surfaces
• Regular guard violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on drugs sold by staff

Council begins the documentary in five years of isolation as retribution for his activism; later in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and suffers sight in an eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

This brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses persisted to collect proof, the directors looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted beyond recognition by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows the victim's parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the television. However multiple imprisoned witnesses informed the family's lawyer that the inmate wielded only a plastic knife and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by four guards regardless.

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

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who informed her that the authorities would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was promoted. Authorities covered for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—a portion of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Work: The Modern-Day Exploitation Scheme

This government benefits financially from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the alarming extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work system that effectively functions as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. The system supplies $450 million in products and services to the government each year for almost minimal wages.

In the program, imprisoned laborers, mostly African American residents considered unfit for society, make $2 a day—the same daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals labor more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and local government entities.

“Authorities allow me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to grant parole to leave and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this low-cost workforce is to the state, and how critical it is for them to maintain people imprisoned,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' work stoppage calling for improved conditions in 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Contraband mobile video shows how prison authorities broke the strike in 11 days by starving prisoners en masse, assaulting Council, deploying personnel to threaten and beat participants, and severing communication from organizers.

A Country-wide Problem Outside One State

This strike may have failed, but the lesson was evident, and beyond the borders of Alabama. An activist ends the film with a call to action: “The things that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in every state and in your name.”

From the reported abuses at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's use of over a thousand incarcerated firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below standard pay, “you see similar situations in the majority of states in the union,” noted Jarecki.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said the co-director. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything