At a time when the U.S. has achieved the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, at a cost of $55 billion a year, and with statistics that tell us:

  • 1-in-4 Black men are in prison, on parole or probation, 10% stripped of their right to vote;
  • Unprecidented numbers of children are locked up, many sentenced into their adult lives;
  • Native Americans have the highest percentage of their population in prison;
  • Latinos and women are the fastest growing populations in the prison system;
  • New prisons are being forced upon rural communities to "revive" their economies;
  • 70% of prisoners are locked up for crimes that did not involve violence;
  • Immigrants are now subject to separate laws, many disappeared and detained indefinitely;
  • All giving the U.S. the highest incarceration rate in the entire world...
Yet, while the U.S. public is witnessing an unfolding crisis of MASS IMPRISONMENT, more and more visible to us each day, this crisis has meant booming profits for a growing number of politicians, corporations, government agencies and unions, where we find increasing political and economic pressure to push the crisis further — far beyond what ideas of "safety" and "justice" would seem to demand.

CORRECTIONS is a story of profits and mass imprisonment: how the histories of racial and economic inequality in the U.S. are emerging today from the walls of its prisons, and how this crisis has formed the incentive, profit and resource base for an entire industry.

Where the "Tough-on-Crime" movement meets the ending of welfare, globalization, finance capital and neo-liberal policy, and today, the "war on terrorism."** CORRECTIONS explores how prisons have fast become the accepted solution to unemployment and housing crises, crumbled schools, livable wages without credit and the undoing of the Western Social Contract, set within the scene of collapsed rural economies and the "urban decay" of potentially expensive neighborhoods.

CORRECTIONS takes you to:

  • A prison trade show & the corporate headquarters of leading prison corporations;
  • A poverty stricken community enticed to host a new prison for "economic development";
  • A timeline of the Tough-on-Crime movement, following its emergence during the Civil Rights Movement, people's movements, the War on Drugs and into political "common sense";
  • A Southern African American community alive with the memory of for-profit prisons, and still struggling for justice today;
  • A juvenile prison where violent defiance of human rights law are perpetrated upon children as young as thirteen years old...

Featuring stories of the leading correctional corporations, testimony from the world's leading experts and the lives of ordinary people, CORRECTIONS takes audiences behind the walls of the prison system that Wall Street has called a "growth industry."

** CORRECTIONS was made before September 11th, 2001, to which the state's response of increasing detentions has not changed but rather grown and exacerbated what this film describes. In fact, the Bush administration used September 11th to grow the industry in a number of ways. PLEASE SEE "LOCKDOWNS UP", a footnote on Corrections which deals with this specifically.

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