CORRECTIONS
by Rod
Hewitt
Prisons
in this past century have become a small empire of graft and corruption,
a hive in which every form of cheating and larceny available to man
thrives. From the drug business usually run by the guards, to the sale
of food and toilet products, to the leasing of prisoners to make profit,
the American prison system has been a benighted monstrosity.
Corrections,
directed by Ashley Hunt, is a brilliant and searing essay on
the present dilemma on the privatization of public prisons. Extending
from Governors and lobbyiests and their attempts to make people prisoners
in order to continue to make a profit, prisons are politicized with
an insidious and evil net.
Hunt deserves
great credit for drawing the map of corruption being carried out by
public officials working incestuously with private companies to make
a machine that removes justice from every aspect of our society.
This is
a film that accomplishes its goals at every level. Hunt never tells
us what to think, but allows us to understand difficult situations with
great ease, his ability to expand subjects to powerful dimensions is
quietly elegant. Corrections
is a glaring cry for justice for the befallen, for the poor, for all
who believe in justice. Corrections has the conviction of great
documentary, to bring us to our truths, to bring us to reaching for
justice, and to save that part of our world that has failed to save
itself.
The complexity
in which our prisons have functioned is well illustrated by the fact
that when public education became a law at the turn of the last century,
public schools were primarily modeled after prison architecture. Hunt
shows how this terrible model has reached an apogee that is dangerous
to the entire society and especially to the justice that binds our land.
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