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When filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered Easterling prison in 2019, they witnessed a deceptively pleasant scene. Like other Alabama's prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to record its annual volunteer-run cookout. On film, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and smiled to musical performances and religious talks. But behind the scenes, a different story emerged—horrific beatings, unreported stabbings, and indescribable violence concealed from public view. Cries for assistance came from sweltering, filthy dorms. When the director moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was obvious that there were areas of the facility that we were not allowed to view,” Jarecki recalled. “They employ the excuse that it’s all about safety and security, because they aim to prevent you from understanding what they’re doing. These prisons are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Neglect

That interrupted cookout event begins the documentary, a powerful new documentary produced over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by the director and Kaufman, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly corrupt system filled with unchecked mistreatment, compulsory work, and extreme brutality. The film chronicles inmates' tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to change conditions deemed “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in the year 2020.

Secret Recordings Uncover Ghastly Realities

Following their abruptly terminated prison visit, the filmmakers made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran organizers Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Kinetik Justice, a group of insiders provided years of evidence filmed on illegal cell phones. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of excrement
• Spoiled meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine officer beatings
• Inmates removed out in remains pouches
• Corridors of men near-catatonic on substances distributed by staff

One activist starts the film in half a decade of solitary confinement as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly killed by guards and suffers sight in an eye.

The Story of One Inmate: Violence and Secrecy

This brutality is, we learn, commonplace within the prison system. As imprisoned sources persisted to collect evidence, the filmmakers looked into the death of an inmate, who was assaulted unrecognizably by officers inside the Donaldson prison in 2019. The documentary follows Davis’s parent, Sandy Ray, as she pursues truth from a uncooperative prison authority. The mother discovers the state’s version—that her son threatened officers with a knife—on the television. However several imprisoned witnesses told the family's attorney that Davis wielded only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped the inmate's skull off the concrete floor “like a basketball.”

After three years of obfuscation, Sandy Ray spoke with Alabama’s “law-and-order” top lawyer a state official, who told her that the authorities would decline to file charges. The officer, who faced more than 20 separate lawsuits alleging excessive force, was promoted. Authorities paid for his defense costs, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51 million used by the government in the last half-decade to defend officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Labor: The Contemporary Exploitation System

The government benefits economically from ongoing mass incarceration without supervision. The film describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the prison system's work initiative, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially operates as a present-day mutation of historical bondage. This program supplies $450m in products and services to the state each year for almost minimal wages.

Under the system, imprisoned workers, overwhelmingly African American Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn $2 a 24-hour period—the same daily wage rate established by the state for incarcerated labor in 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor more than 12 hours for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to labor in the community, but they refuse me to give me release to leave and go home to my family.”

Such workers are statistically less likely to be paroled than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “That gives you an idea of how important this low-cost workforce is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Struggle

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a system-wide prisoners’ strike calling for better treatment in 2022, led by an activist and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile footage reveals how ADOC ended the protest in 11 days by depriving inmates en masse, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and cutting off contact from strike leaders.

The Country-wide Problem Beyond Alabama

This strike may have ended, but the lesson was clear, and outside 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 region and in your behalf.”

Starting with the reported violations at the state of New York's a prison facility, to the state of California's deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for below minimum wage, “you see similar situations in most jurisdictions in the union,” said the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything