America holds more prisoners than any other country on earth, in raw numbers and per capita, and this Empire Files episode traces how that happened. Correspondent Abby Martin lays out the arithmetic first: five percent of the world's population, twenty-five percent of its prisoners, more than two million people behind bars. She interviews Eddie Conway, held as a political prisoner for 44 years, and Eugene Puryear, author of "Shackled and Chained," about who fills these cells and why. The film follows the money running through the system, from prison phone contracts that kick back 42 percent of revenue to the states, worth over $150 million a year, to low-bid contracts that gut food and medical care, to corporations paying inmates almost nothing for production work. Martin connects poverty and race to who ends up incarcerated, and points to the near-total absence of mental health treatment and rehabilitation funding. The picture that emerges is a system sustained less by public safety than by the profit built into every part of it.