Bang Kwang prison in Bangkok, nicknamed the Bangkok Hilton, holds around a thousand men to a dorm, foreign and Thai prisoners crammed together with almost no privacy and little medical care. The film follows Michael Connell, a 19-year-old former supermarket worker from Manchester serving 99 years for smuggling 3,000 ecstasy pills, who gets by teaching English to other inmates. Andrew Hawkes, a long-serving lifer, describes the decision that put him inside and what two decades of confinement have done to him. Cameras follow the prison's own subcultures: katoeys running the internal television station, men on death row shuffling past on their way to somewhere else, and a hospital ward where a patient is dying of AIDS with little the staff can do. A tour of the execution room ends the film, the walls still marked from the era of shooting before lethal injection replaced it. The picture that emerges is less about crime than about what a severely overcrowded system does to the people it holds.