DOCUMENTARY FROM
THE MOVEMENT FOR
PRISON ABOLITION
VIDEO COLLECTION
A one hour documentary about the privatization of U.S. prisons, where privatization reveals itself as just one piece of a larger puzzle in which a number of politicians, businesses and state interests desire a growing prison system.
Asking one of the biggest questions surrounding today’s prison expansion, "Where do new prisons get built?", this 20-minute documentary explores why new prisons are being built and why they are typically placed in remote, rural communities.
To better understand what struggles we face today, we can look to history to help us interpret the present and our place within it. A brief yet compelling portrait of one of the U.S.’ most infamous rebellions, and a most brutal example of state repression that was deployed to destroy it.
A nine minute video essay based upon the optimistic stock projections announced to Wall Street stock analysts by a private prison company, when Cornell Company made public its hopes that private prison companies may get fat government contracts to build interment camps for Arab Americans.
A grassroots protest dances its way through New Orleans on September 8th, 2001. Led by parents fed up with their children’s abuse at the hands of the state's notorious youth prison, this video documents their demand to shut it down.
The second video following a campaign to shut down the notorious Tallulah youth prison in Northern Louisiana, following a movement of parents, community and advocates through public hearings where bereaved parents get the chance to spell out their frustrations to law makers and demand a prison be closed.
An accidental circustance of counter-surveillance to keep state power in check, it is a brief glimpse of the flexing of state power in communities whose voice is more criminalized than listened to and respected.
The first of two videos about Critical Resistance's Southern Conference, ORGANIZING CRITICAL RESISTANCE SOUTH is an 18 minute piece that follows the 2 year organizing process leading up to the conference. It was initially screened on the conference's opening night.
3,000 people from around the South and the U.S. pour into New Orleans’ Tremé community to share stories, responses and analyses of the growing prison system which affects so many in so many different but connected ways. One of the seminal Critical Resistance conferences that built today’s movement.
What begins as a simple dialogue on why a labor union for textile workers would support an anti-prison conference expands into a eloquent analysis of how globalization affects jobs and economy, how capital flight frames crime policy, and how race, gender and class prejudice the vision and potential of the Left.
Take a minute to write an introduction that is short, sweet, and to the point. If you sell something, use this space to describe it in detail and tell us why we should make a purchase. Tap into your creativity. You’ve got this.
MAPS
A map that charts two figures as they’re produced and moved through the global economy — “the refugee” and “the prisoner.”
A map asking “what is the prison industrial complex?”, charting influences on prison growth as they form into an expanding system.
A film about change that looks at closed prisons around the U.S., considering what they’ve turned into, the community efforts behind their closure, and the forms of loss and reckoning that their closure does and does not address.
A two-channel video and photographic series that introduces the pending closure of Arizona’s Florence Correctional Complex, amidst today’s calls for prison abolition, in dialogue with the Phoenix grassroots organization, Mass Liberation Arizona.
A two-channel video about the histories and futures of Rikers Island jail complex in New York, set against conversations about abolition and imagining what Rikers could become other than a prison.
Photography and writing that studies the roots of modern prisons in fortresses and castles, architecture of warfare that reveal something of the nature of mass incarceration today
A large body of photograph and text pieces that engage the landscapes in which prisons, jails and detention centers throughout all 50 U.S. states and territories
Video and still photographs made in Mississippi the summer before the 2004 presidential election, investigating youth boot camps in the state.
A six-channel video installation remixing archival and architectural representations of the U.S. prison system.
RELATED PROJECTS
ABOUT THIS project
The Correction’s Documentary Project began with artist and filmmaker Ashley Hunt’s first feature documentary, CORRECTIONS, produced between 1998 and 2001. Made in dialogue with key grassroots organizations around the U.S. on the front lines of the effects of mass incarceration and the legacies that it grew out of, CORRECTIONS found a useful place within the emerging movement against the massive growth of the U.S. prison system. Hunt continued with additional projects — “Footnotes,” videos, maps, landscape photography, made in collaboration with different campaigns and grassroots organizations, while producing popular education materials from the project’s ongoing research … CLICK FOR MORE