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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively pleasant atmosphere. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely bans journalistic entry, but allowed the filmmakers to film its yearly volunteer-run barbecue. During film, imprisoned individuals, mostly Black, celebrated and laughed to live music and sermons. However off camera, a different story surfaced—horrific beatings, unreported violent attacks, and unimaginable violence swept under the rug. Pleas for help came from sweltering, dirty housing units. As soon as Jarecki approached the sounds, a corrections officer halted recording, claiming it was dangerous to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the facility that we were forbidden to view,” the filmmaker recalled. “They employ the excuse that everything is about safety and safety, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like secret locations.”

The Stunning Documentary Exposing Decades of Abuse

This thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a stunning new documentary produced over six years. Co-directed by the director and his partner, the two-hour production exposes a gallingly broken system rife with unregulated mistreatment, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It documents inmates' tremendous struggles, under constant physical threat, to change conditions declared “illegal” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Footage Uncover Horrific Realities

Following their suddenly terminated Easterling visit, the directors made contact with individuals inside the state prison system. Guided by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of sources supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on contraband cell phones. These recordings is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Spoiled meals and blood-streaked surfaces
• Routine officer violence
• Men removed out in remains pouches
• Hallways of individuals unresponsive on substances distributed by officers

Council starts the film in five years of isolation as retribution for his organizing; subsequently in filming, he is nearly killed by officers and suffers vision in an eye.

The Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Secrecy

Such violence is, we learn, standard within the prison system. While incarcerated sources persisted to collect evidence, the filmmakers investigated the killing of Steven Davis, who was beaten unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson correctional facility in October 2019. The documentary traces the victim's mother, Sandy Ray, as she seeks truth from a uncooperative ADOC. She learns the official version—that her son threatened guards with a weapon—on the television. But several incarcerated witnesses told the family's lawyer that Davis held only a plastic utensil and yielded at once, only to be beaten by multiple officers regardless.

A guard, Roderick Gadson, stomped Davis’s skull off the hard surface “repeatedly.”

After three years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with Alabama’s “law-and-order” attorney general a state official, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous individual legal actions claiming brutality, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million used by the government in the past five years to protect officers from wrongdoing claims.

Compulsory Work: A Contemporary Slavery System

This state profits financially from ongoing imprisonment without oversight. The film describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s labor program, a forced-labor arrangement that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. This program provides $450m in products and work to the state annually for virtually minimal wages.

In the program, incarcerated laborers, mostly African American Alabamians deemed unfit for the community, make two dollars a day—the same daily wage rate set by the state for incarcerated workers in the year 1927, at the peak of Jim Crow. These individuals labor upwards of half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to give me parole to get out and go home to my loved ones.”

Such laborers are numerically less likely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those deemed a higher public safety risk. “This illustrates you an idea of how valuable this free workforce is to the state, and how important it is for them to maintain people locked up,” said Jarecki.

Prison-wide Strike and Continued Fight

The documentary concludes in an remarkable feat of activism: a state-wide inmates' strike calling for improved treatment in October 2022, led by Council and Melvin Ray. Illegal mobile video reveals how prison authorities broke the protest in less than two weeks by depriving prisoners collectively, choking the leader, sending soldiers to threaten and attack others, and severing communication from organizers.

The National Issue Outside Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the message was clear, and outside the borders of the region. Council concludes the documentary with a plea for change: “The abuses that are taking place in this state are happening in every region and in the public's behalf.”

From the reported abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to California’s deployment of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles fires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable things in the majority of states in the union,” noted the filmmaker.

“This isn’t only Alabama,” added the co-director. “There is a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything