A wounded man makes a desperate call, reporting that a gunman is holding a coffee shop hostage and shooting anyone he pleases — but when the SWAT team shows up, the madman opens fire. Through flashbacks, a waitress serves an array of customers, all of whom are blissfully unaware of how their lives will be horrifically changed.

The daily lives of prisoners in Emerald City, an experimental unit of the Oswald Maximum Security Prison where ingroups – Muslims, Latinos, Italians, Aryans – stick close to their mutual friends and terrorizes their mutual enemies.

An ex-con, on parole and trying to straighten his life out, decides to resume his boxing career when one of his prison enemies escapes and kills his girlfriend.