Hard Time Series Premiere Monday February 23 at 9p et/pt

Some people ask us: what's it like to spend a year inside prison?

Time transforms everything, and the chance to film over such an extended period of time showed us that even behind bars, nothing stays the same for long. People get transferred, room with new 'cellies', get paroled or get denied parole, get into fights, see visitors from the outside world, and fall in and out of routines. Soon, we, too, became participants in this rhythm, familiar faces in the prisons, and part of the landscape.

We didn't really know what a year in side would reveal. And it turned out to be way more than we expected. When you start to plum the depths of people's lives - even lives that are essentially in limbo - a whole world opens up. You see people's hopes and despairs, the way the experience of incarceration changes them, the way the prison itself deals with the ebb and flow of people. It is often tedious, with sudden jolting events that disrupt everything. From fights to escapes to shakedowns, after a while you get a sense that anything can happen when you least expect it.

After a while, inmates started to come to us with their stories. I remember the day "Samantha" - a man who had slowly been transforming into a woman inside prison --- came up to us on the tiers and said, "I have a story to tell you..." We got to follow that story, and dozens of others, which revealed to us the hidden world of inmates.

What I found most interesting was the tension between the system and the inmates. Georgia has a unique approach - they call it para-military - which insists on strict structure and order. And it works. But inmates will always try to live by their own rules. And watching the two sides negotiate who is in control of the hearts, minds, and daily routines of the facility is a fascinating view into the ways in which communities inside and outside of prison form and evolve. It raises a lot of questions, too, about who really belongs behind bars and for how long. Georgia's Department of Corrections does not set the sentences - they merely carry them out. The year made us think hard about the whole justice process and why prisons have become our nation's preferred method of punishment. As the prison commissioner in Georgia said, we need to distinguish between whom we are afraid of and whom we are mad at.

At the end of every day filming, we got to walk out and savor the freedom we sometimes take for granted. But even walking around in our own daily lives, it's hard not to sometimes reflect on the more than 2 million people who are living behind bars right at this moment. We hope these films give some view into that hidden world and generate thoughtful discussion.