Missouri locks up more than 23,000 people, and this episode of the Behind Bars / World's Toughest Prisons series goes inside the Northeast Correctional Center in Bowling Green, a state facility roughly an hour north of St. Louis. The film follows Michael Whitfield, a 60-year-old inmate convicted in the 1990s, who describes something close to optimism about his time inside, a rarity the film attributes to a genuine shift in how the prison is run. Officer Peterson and inmate Richard McCool provide the two other vantage points, guard and prisoner, as the cameras move through cell blocks, work programs, and the daily routines that make up life in a facility built to hold thousands. Missouri spends over 800 million dollars a year running 21 state prisons, and the film uses NECC as a test case for whether a different approach to incarceration, one aimed at rehabilitation rather than pure containment, can actually take hold inside a maximum-security system.