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AL.com spent 2014 digging into Alabama's prison problems, interviewing hundreds of people involved in the system, poring through medical contracts and salaries and discipline records and staffing reports and lawsuits and internal investigative files and much more. They began by announcing what we were going to do. Then they began reporting, occasionally sharing process updates on records requests and reporting milestones. At times they asked readers what they wanted to know, who they wanted to hear from, what they thought of official responses. AL.com solicited reader experiences inside prisons and received hundreds of responses to build a database of potential sources and continued with classic reporting, speaking to all sides, examining records, finding out what went wrong, who was profiting, finding prison doctors who lost licenses for sleeping with patients, wardens who were promoted after beating inmates.