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As filmmakers the directors and his co-director entered Easterling prison in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to other Alabama correctional institutions, the prison mostly prohibits media entry, but allowed the crew to record its yearly community-organized barbecue. On camera, incarcerated individuals, mostly Black, danced and smiled to live music and sermons. But off camera, a different story surfaced—terrifying beatings, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from overheated, filthy dorms. When the director approached the voices, a prison official stopped filming, stating it was dangerous to speak with the men without a security escort.

“It became apparent that there were areas of the prison that we were not allowed to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about security and safety, because they don’t want you from comprehending what is occurring. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Revealing Documentary Exposing Decades of Abuse

That thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and Kaufman, the feature-length film reveals a gallingly corrupt institution rife with unchecked mistreatment, forced labor, and unimaginable brutality. It documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under ongoing physical threat, to improve situations deemed “illegal” by the US justice department in 2020.

Secret Footage Reveal Horrific Conditions

Following their abruptly terminated prison tour, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied years of evidence recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Heaps of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in body bags
• Hallways of individuals near-catatonic on drugs distributed by staff

One activist begins the film in five years of isolation as punishment for his activism; later in filming, he is nearly killed by officers and loses vision in one eye.

The Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Secrecy

Such violence is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated witnesses continued to gather proof, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by officers inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in 2019. The documentary follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a recalcitrant ADOC. The mother discovers the official version—that her son threatened guards with a weapon—on the news. But multiple incarcerated observers informed the family's attorney that the inmate held only a toy utensil and surrendered immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers anyway.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the state would decline to file criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 individual lawsuits claiming excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other guard—part of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to defend staff from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Forced Work: The Contemporary Slavery System

This state profits financially from continued imprisonment without oversight. 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 supplies $450 million in products and work to the state annually for almost no pay.

Under the system, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly Black residents deemed unfit for society, make $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate set by Alabama for incarcerated labor in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. They labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

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

These workers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a greater security risk. “That gives you an understanding of how valuable this free workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an incredible feat of organizing: a state-wide inmates' strike demanding improved conditions in 2022, organized by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal cell phone video shows how prison authorities broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving inmates en masse, assaulting Council, deploying soldiers to threaten and attack others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Beyond Alabama

The protest may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the state of the region. Council ends the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in your region and in your behalf.”

From the reported abuses at New York’s a prison facility, to California’s deployment of over a thousand incarcerated emergency responders to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “one observes similar situations in most states in the country,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything