🔗 Share this article

As filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in the year 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful atmosphere. Similar to other Alabama's prisons, the prison largely bans journalistic entry, but allowed the crew to record its annual community-organized cookout. During film, imprisoned men, mostly Black, danced and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a different narrative surfaced—terrifying assaults, hidden violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Cries for help came from sweltering, dirty dorms. As soon as the director moved toward the sounds, a prison official halted filming, claiming it was unsafe to interact with the men without a security escort.

“It became apparent that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to view,” Jarecki remembered. “They use the idea that everything is about safety and security, because they aim to prevent you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are like secret locations.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Neglect

This thwarted cookout meeting opens the documentary, a powerful new documentary made over half a decade. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the two-hour production reveals a shockingly broken system filled with unregulated abuse, forced labor, and extreme cruelty. It documents prisoners’ tremendous struggles, under ongoing danger, to improve situations declared “unconstitutional” by the federal authorities in the year 2020.

Covert Recordings Reveal Ghastly Realities

Following their abruptly terminated Easterling tour, the filmmakers made contact with individuals inside the Alabama department of corrections. Led by long-incarcerated organizers Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of evidence recorded on illegal mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Vermin-ridden cells
• Piles of human waste
• Rotting meals and blood-stained surfaces
• Routine guard beatings
• Inmates carried out in remains pouches
• Corridors of individuals unresponsive on drugs distributed by staff

Council starts the film in half a decade of isolation as retribution for his activism; later in production, he is almost killed by guards and loses vision in one eye.

A Case of One Inmate: Brutality and Obfuscation

This brutality is, the film shows, commonplace within the prison system. While incarcerated sources persisted to gather proof, the directors investigated the death of Steven Davis, who was beaten beyond recognition by officers inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary traces Davis’s parent, a family member, as she pursues answers from a uncooperative prison authority. She learns the official explanation—that Davis menaced guards with a knife—on the news. However several incarcerated witnesses informed Ray’s lawyer that the inmate held only a plastic utensil and yielded immediately, only to be assaulted by multiple officers regardless.

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

Following years of evasion, Sandy Ray spoke with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer a state official, who informed her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. The officer, who had numerous separate legal actions claiming excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his legal bills, as well as those of all other officer—a portion of the $51m spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from misconduct claims.

Forced Labor: A Contemporary Exploitation Scheme

The government benefits financially from continued mass incarceration without oversight. The film describes the shocking extent and hypocrisy of the ADOC’s work initiative, a compulsory-work system that essentially operates as a modern-day version of chattel slavery. This program provides $450m in goods and work to the government each year for almost no pay.

Under the program, incarcerated workers, mostly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for the community, earn two dollars a day—the same pay scale established by the state for imprisoned labor in the year 1927, at the height of racial segregation. These individuals work upwards of half a day for private companies or government locations including the government building, the governor’s mansion, the Alabama supreme court, and municipal offices.

“They trust me to labor in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to leave and go home to my loved ones.”

These workers are statistically more unlikely to be released than those who are not, even those considered a higher public safety threat. “That gives you an understanding of how important this low-cost labor is to Alabama, and how critical it is for them to keep people locked up,” said the director.

Prison-wide Strike and Ongoing Fight

The documentary culminates in an incredible feat of organizing: a system-wide prisoners’ work stoppage demanding improved conditions in 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Contraband cell phone footage reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in 11 days by depriving prisoners collectively, choking Council, sending soldiers to intimidate and attack participants, and severing communication from organizers.

A National Issue Outside One State

The strike may have failed, but the lesson was clear, and beyond the borders of the region. Council ends the documentary with a call to action: “The things that are taking place in this state are happening in your state and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented abuses at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the frontlines of the Los Angeles wildfires for below standard pay, “you see comparable things in most jurisdictions in the country,” said the filmmaker.

“This is not just one state,” added the co-director. “We’re witnessing a new wave of ‘law-and-order’ policy and rhetoric, and a punitive strategy to {everything