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When filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Like the state's Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling mostly prohibits journalistic entry, but permitted the crew to film its yearly community-organized barbecue. During camera, incarcerated men, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to live music and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a contrasting story surfaced—terrifying assaults, hidden stabbings, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for help were heard from sweltering, filthy dorms. As soon as the director approached the sounds, a prison official stopped recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a security chaperone.

“It was very clear that there were areas of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, since they aim to prevent you from understanding what is occurring. These prisons are like black sites.”

The Revealing Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

That thwarted barbecue meeting begins the documentary, a stunning new documentary made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the two-hour film exposes a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated abuse, compulsory work, and unimaginable brutality. The film documents prisoners’ herculean struggles, under constant danger, to improve situations declared “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Ghastly Conditions

After their abruptly ended prison tour, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Led by veteran activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied years of footage recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is disturbing:

• Rat-infested living spaces
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled food and blood-stained floors
• Regular officer violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

Council begins the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; later in filming, he is almost beaten to death by officers and suffers vision in one eye.

A Story of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the ADOC. As imprisoned sources persisted to collect evidence, the directors investigated the death of an inmate, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s mother, a family member, as she pursues truth from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s explanation—that Davis threatened officers with a weapon—on the news. However multiple imprisoned witnesses told Ray’s attorney that the inmate wielded only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by four guards regardless.

A guard, an officer, smashed Davis’s head off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After years of evasion, the mother met with the state's “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who informed her that the state would not press charges. The officer, who had numerous individual legal actions alleging brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m used by the government in the past five years to protect staff from wrongdoing claims.

Forced Labor: The Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This state profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the alarming extent and double standard of the ADOC’s work initiative, a forced-labor system that effectively functions as a modern-day version of historical bondage. The system supplies $450 million in products and services to the state each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the program, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American residents deemed unfit for society, make two dollars a day—the identical pay scale established by Alabama for incarcerated workers in 1927, at the height of racial segregation. They work upwards of half a day for private companies or public sites including the state capitol, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and municipal offices.

“Authorities allow me to work in the public, but they refuse me to give me release to get out and return to my family.”

These workers are numerically less likely to be paroled than those who are not, even those considered a greater security risk. “That gives you an idea of how valuable this low-cost labor is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Ongoing Fight

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding improved treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video shows how ADOC ended the strike in less than two weeks by depriving inmates en masse, choking the leader, sending soldiers to intimidate and beat others, and severing contact from organizers.

A National Problem Outside Alabama

The protest may have ended, but the message was evident, and beyond the state of the region. Council ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are taking place in your region and in the public's name.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's deployment of 1,100 incarcerated firefighters to the danger zones of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “one observes comparable situations in most states in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not just one state,” added Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything