downstate

After Downstate Correctional Facility closed in 2022, the massive job of holding and transporting hundreds of incarcerated people to prisons across the state was crammed into a single roach-and-rat-infested cell block in Green Haven, a maximum-security prison located in a rural town called Stormville.

The decision to close the Downstate facility previously used for transfers was because of the declining prison population, down more than 54 percent from the state’s high in 1999 and staff shortages.

But Downstate was run how a transit facility is supposed to run.

Although not for the same reason, prisoners and correctional officers alike say the same thing: Downstate never should have closed.

Much of the film was shot in two real prisons — including Downstate Correctional Facility in upstate New York, which had just been decommissioned two weeks before the cast arrived.