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As filmmakers the directors and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a misleadingly pleasant scene. Similar to other Alabama's correctional institutions, Easterling largely prohibits media access, but allowed the crew to film its annual community-organized cookout. On film, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and sermons. But behind the scenes, a different narrative emerged—horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable brutality concealed from public view. Pleas for help were heard from overheated, dirty dorms. As soon as the director approached the voices, a prison official halted recording, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that certain sections of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They use the excuse that it’s all about security and safety, because they don’t want you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

The Revealing Film Exposing Years of Abuse

That interrupted cookout event opens the documentary, a powerful new film made over half a decade. Co-directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour film reveals a shockingly corrupt institution filled with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme brutality. It chronicles inmates' herculean efforts, under constant danger, to improve conditions declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in 2020.

Secret Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their abruptly ended prison tour, the filmmakers connected with men inside the Alabama department of corrections. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders provided years of evidence recorded on contraband mobile devices. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden living spaces
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting food and blood-stained floors
• Routine guard violence
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

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

The Case of Steven Davis: Brutality and Secrecy

This violence is, the film shows, commonplace within the ADOC. While incarcerated witnesses continued to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s mother, a family member, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. The mother discovers the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a weapon—on the news. But several imprisoned witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that Davis held only a plastic utensil and surrendered at once, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

A guard, an officer, stomped Davis’s head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

Following years of obfuscation, the mother spoke with Alabama’s “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had more than 20 individual lawsuits alleging brutality, was given a higher rank. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Labor: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This government profits economically from continued imprisonment without supervision. The film details the shocking scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a compulsory-work arrangement that effectively functions as a modern-day version of historical bondage. The system supplies $450m in products and services to the government annually for almost minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unfit for the community, make $2 a 24-hour period—the identical daily wage rate established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor more than half a day for corporate entities or government locations including the state capitol, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and return to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to maintain individuals locked up,” stated Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of organizing: a system-wide inmates' work stoppage demanding better treatment in 2022, organized by Council and his co-organizer. Illegal mobile video reveals how ADOC broke the strike in less than two weeks by starving prisoners collectively, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to threaten and beat participants, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

A National Problem Beyond One State

This protest may have failed, but the message was evident, and beyond the borders of Alabama. Council ends the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are occurring in Alabama are taking place in your region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at New York’s Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of 1,100 incarcerated emergency responders to the frontlines of the LA wildfires for less than minimum wage, “you see similar situations in the majority of states in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t just Alabama,” said Kaufman. “There is a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ policy and rhetoric, and a retributive approach to {everything