by Cameron Jette
“More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet prisons have never felt further further away or more out of sight.”
This is the way Director Brett Story prefaces her unique documentary that pierces the veil of this shrouded industry. Story released “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes” on Nov. 4 and is currently on tour across Canada and the United States. Story hosted a screening of her documentary at the University of Ottawa on Feb. 2.
Straying from the usual prison documentary narrative where the director follows the plight of those within the prison walls, Story instead takes the audience across the U.S. over the course of twelve different vignettes that highlight the effects of the prison industrial complex without ever showing the inside of a penitentiary. Story takes the viewer from a California mountainside that plays host to an all-women, all-inmate firefighting team that works at a fraction of the cost of regularly employed firefighters, to a Bronx warehouse of prison-approved goods, to an Appalachian coal mine reliant on cost-effective prison jobs.
By examining the impacts of the prison-industrial complex beyond penitentiary walls, Story demonstrates a contradiction between the extensive nature of the United States prison system and its increasing disappearance from the public’s view.
“It used to be that prisons were built in urban cities, like in the middle of Kingston or Philadelphia,” commented Story at the uOttawa screening, “[but] more and more they are built in these rural areas and remote places that are hard to get to, on the one hand, and just hard to find. There is a deliberate effort to unsee the prison in our geographic, as well as our psychic landscape, [while] more and more people are disappeared within them.”
Here, Story touches on a kind of normalization of the prison industrial complex, as many of the documentary’s vignettes depict what might be construed as positive aspects of mass incarceration. Simply visit insidecdcr.ca.gov and you will see numerous articles describing the accomplishments of the aforementioned all-inmate firefighting team, including when, on Feb. 15, over 200 inmates were tasked with stemming a sudden flash flood from a dam near Oroville, California. Not only does this make the prison system appear innocuous, it makes it seem beneficial, or even essential, to American prosperity.
“I was very interested in trying to make a film about prisons that wasn’t about crime and that suggests that prisons play all these other functions; that they’re related to other institutions of power, that are outside of the purview of so called crime or even violence and matters of safety.”
As an academic, a filmmaker and an activist, Story finds that the use of art in prison abolition work plays a unique and important role in breaking down walls.
“I think one of the things art can do, even if just a little bit, it can pierce some of the ideological narratives and the magical thinking and the attachments to ideas even if it doesn’t replace them. It’s an attempt to unsettle a set of ideas, both the idea that prisons are natural or necessary and that prisons exist to solve the problem of crime.”
This eye-opening documentary comes to challenge the idea that prisons exist as a neutral entity made to uphold law and order and instead shows how the prison industrial complex is present throughout every aspect of society. A definite must see for any budding prison abolitionist, a screening of Story’s film can be requested at grasshopperfilm.com, where it is also available for purchase.
This article first appeared in Vol. 9, No. 5 (February/March 2017).
