Andrew Jarecki

You know, maybe there's not a man with a bullwhip that's standing over them, but it's in some ways, you know, every bit as bad because if you refuse to work, then you can be you can be given a disciplinary, which can extend your sentence.

You can be placed in solitary, which happens a lot in Alabama.

So basically the UN says solitary confinement for more than 15 days is torture.

They're putting people in for years at a time.

And you could be moved to an even more violent facility than the one that you're in.

So it is a coerced, forced labor.

You can't be sick one day.

You can't do any of that.

But I think what people don't understand is

The prisoners in Alabama and some other states, it's not that they're being forced to work in the prison.

Maybe reasonable people could say, oh, maybe you should be sweeping the floor in the prison if you're working in the prison.

But they also get leased out to the governor's mansion where they clean the floors and they polish the tiles and they do the landscaping.

They also get leased out to road crews, construction crews.

The state makes money from all of that.

They issue invoices, which you can see in the film.

You know, this is for X dollars an hour.

And then they pay the men $2 a day to do sanitation work or something like that.

And then they send them out to work at McDonald's.

They lease them to McDonald's.

They lease them to Burger King.