holman. here at the tag plant, inmates make license plates and are paid 30 cents an hour. prisonersash on food items in holman's sandwich stores. >> i buy candy, cokes, zoo zoos, wham whams, honeybuns. i crave honey buns. i buy honey buns. >> we have our jumbo honey buns, we got the blueberry and we got the butterhorn. >> i can't buy no wine. i can't buy no kind of alcohol, nothing like that. >> armen power received a life sentence for auto theft after threatening to kill his trial judge. >> i told him to kiss my [ bleep ] i ain't going to take that, i'm going to kill him. and i jumped for him. and they jumped me. police got me walking me upstairs laughing at me. saying, i ain't never seen nobody short as i am jump a judge. they thought it was funny. i didn't think it was funny. >> power, who has worked at the tag plant since 1983, tries to stay optimistic, in spite of his circumstances. >> you're in prison. you might as well make the best of it. so that's what i'm doing. i'm making the best of it. i'm having fun. the judge thinks he got me. the judge ain't got me. >> in the past 23

. >> there was an unusual phenomenon at holman prison. they had a big problem with public masturbation. they were dealing with the problem as best they can. if a person got caught, they were immediately put into lockup and they had to go through certain programs in order to get out of lockup. >> the violation is known as rule 38. and the prison's warden had developed a no-nonsense approach to dealing with it. >> my rule is, if you get caught with a 38, there's no questions asked. we're locking you up. we'll sort it out later, but for the time being, you're going to lockup. that's just automatic. okay? the first offense is 90 days, second time i double it, third time it goes to 270, the fourth time it's a year. >> but it happened a lot for some reason there. it was getting to the point where, particularly in the lockdown facility, you'd walk down the tier and all you'd see are hands going. it gets pretty unnerving after a while. i attribute it to the fact that there were a tremendous amount of very young men locked up there, with very long

the reality of prison is you can go from calm and quiet to a life-and-death conflict in an instant. >> about halfway through ten weeks of filming for our "extended stay" series at holman correctional facility in alabama, our crew experienced that reality firsthand. they had just finished a routine interview with an inmate in his cell. it was a little after 12:00 noon. >> there was a phone call, and one of our producers went back to get this phone call. and if it wasn't for that, we would have been gone, we would have been out to lunch. as we're standing there waiting for our producer to finish with their phone call, these officers run by. so obviously, i turn on the camera, press record and roll with them. >> suddenly all these officers ran by me and we heard all this commotion and i saw an inmate who was wearing white covered in blood. brian, our cameraman, and i both started filming immediately and realized that a stabbing had taken place. it was such a chaotic scene that i was trying to keep track of what everybody was doing. some of the officers were trying to rescue the stabbing victim. other officers were going after the assailant. >> i got a knife. >> the funny

prisons are like cities behind walls. if that metaphor were applied to alabama's holman correctional facility, inmate, robert, would be abouteet long by three feet wide. >> this is home. bed to bed. right here. each one of these beds is like having a house in a subdivision out there on the street, only no walls, no doors, no privacy, so you just kind of ignore what's going on next door to you. >> after 20 years of incarceration, 17 served at holman, teter has developed an appreciation for simple routines. >> cup of coffee. first thing. cup of coffee and a cigarette. that's it. that's every morning. then, you know, comb your hair, get dressed, go outside. there is no such thing as a holiday here. there's no christmas. there's no tree. every day is the same. when you get up, it's the same people, the same thing, the same rat race, and there's no relaxation. >> at the time of our shoot he still had ten years left on a 30-year sentence for some very serious convictions. they include sodomy, public exposure and enticement of a child. >> robert was one of those inmates who was adamant he was falsely accused, falsely convicted. >>