Catalog Search Results
Language
English
Description
In the United States, prosecutors file about 13 million misdemeanor cases each year. These cases, which constitute about 80 percent of all cases nationwide, are mainly low-level, nonviolent crimes, such as drug possession, disorderly conduct, shoplifting, and prostitution. Some prosecutors, including those in are processed. The district attorney’s offices in areas like Suffolk County, Massachusetts, and the New York City borough of Manhattan, have...
Language
English
Description
El Salvador's prisons are bloody, brutal, and overcrowded. With 700 arrests a day, that level of overcrowding shows no signs of abating. And they have one of the highest homicides rates in the world. But rather than give up on prisons and prisoners, the people who are running the prison service have decided to change tack and reform the system. Their response is Yo Cambio. First change: the language. No longer referred to as inmates or prisoners now...
Language
English
Description
Are prisons supposed to rehabilitate convicts, punish them, or simply keep them off the streets? The answer depends on who is being asked. This program explores the current state of prisons in America and examines their conflicting mandates. The Directors of the National Prison Project of the ACLU and the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, the Governor of South Dakota, an Arizona sheriff, adult and juvenile inmates, and others consider...
Language
English
Description
Totally isolated from the outer world and deprived of virtually all forms of meaningful activity and social contact, inmates idle away their years in a limbo of concrete, steel, fluorescent light, and little else. In part one of this program, convicts speak out as ABC News anchor Ted Koppel explores solitary confinement in today's super-maximum security prisons, the quarters of men too violent or uncooperative for incarceration anywhere else. In part...
Language
English
Description
Most prison documentaries focus on the inmates. This sobering program features guards and prisoners alike, giving the viewer two interpretations of life at Ohio's Warren Correctional Institution. From the smallest detail-how cellmates rig a shabby partition around their toilet-to the cynicism and frontline sociology with which the corrections officers analyze their surroundings, the video clearly elucidates the effects of prolonged monotony and confinement...
Language
English
Description
This Academy Award-nominated program uses dramatic reenactments, old lithographs, and photographs to trace the fascinating history of the world's first full-scale penitentiary-Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia. Conceived as a humane alternative to the overcrowding and debauchery of smaller jails, the prison's fortress-like design and policy of separate confinement and meaningful labor became the correctional model for prisons worldwide. Important...
Language
English
Description
Angola Penitentiary has its own radio station, its own magazine, and-most notably-its own highly organized evangelical ministry. It is also a working farm, tended in large part by compliant, nonviolent inmates. What forces are at work in the once-notorious Louisiana institution? Have its residents embraced religion sincerely, or is Angola a focal point of sophisticated brainwashing? This program invites viewers to consider those questions. Examining...
Language
English
Description
Too young to drive, but old enough to kill. What happens to children convicted of felonies? How and where are they incarcerated? Can they be helped? And does their punishment really fit their crimes? In this program, judges, legal counsel, law enforcement officers, academic experts from Emory and Rutgers Universities, the Director of the Institute for Minority Health Research, and others examine the trend in the U.S. toward trying children as adults...
Language
English
Description
Some mistakes are fixable. Wrongful conviction and subsequent execution is not. In this program, ABC News correspondent John Donvan traces the history of the death penalty in the U.S. since 1935 while capturing the views of George W. Bush and Illinois governor George Ryan. Then, Gerald Kogan, former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, and Dudley Sharp, director of Justice for All, join anchor Chris Wallace to discuss the use of DNA evidence...
Language
English
Description
Once solely a realm of punishment, some prisons now offer choices intended to educate, empower, and, ultimately, liberate. This program goes inside three women's prisons in the U.S. and Canada, contrasting old and new correctional philosophies. Key differences between the countries' systems are noted, such as the level of tolerance for sexual relationships between inmates. Interviews with the women poignantly highlight their struggles with drugs,...
Language
English
Description
Marshall Allen is just one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who leave state or federal prisons and return to their home communities each year. He is typical of the majority of convicts in the U.S. in that he served time on a drug charge-in his case, possession of crack cocaine. He is also not unusual in the failure of his first attempt to make it on the outside. But a second term behind bars has hardened his resolve to succeed. This ABC News...
Language
English
Description
What is it like when a family member gets locked up? How do you cope emotionally or financially? Can you really forgive someone who commits a terrible crime? This documentary film examines what it is like for family members when a loved one gets on the wrong side of the law. Filmed over 18 months, it follows the lives of four young people as they grapple with the challenges that come with loving someone who has been convicted of a crime. Prison, My...
Language
English
Description
Prisons have become incubators for hate, where ethnic and white supremacist enclaves vie for control through violence and coercion directed along color lines. In part one of this program, ABC News anchor Ted Koppel talks with prisoners doomed to solitary confinement due to their gang affiliations. They discuss the dangers that drove them to join-and that keep them looking over their shoulders even in the so-called protective environment of a supermax...
14) Life Inside Out
Language
English
Description
This vérité-style documentary takes viewers inside the walls of Grand Valley Institution, one of five federal prisons for women in Canada. The first film to go behind the walls of this female prison, it features three unforgettable women over the age of 50. Kim is a quiet immigrant from Vietnam who waits with increasing desperation for a parole board hearing put off so often she begins to doubt it will happen. Pearl relies on her faith in God to...
Language
English
Description
The United States is facing a crisis of mass incarceration with over 2.2 million people packed into its jails and prisons. To understand the human toll of this crisis, Rikers Island is a good place to start. Of the more than 7,500 people detained at Rikers Island on any given day, almost 80% have not yet been found guilty or innocent of the charges they face. All are at risk in the pervasive culture of violence that forces people to come to terms...
Language
English
Description
This program enters a world rarely seen: the world of an inmate waiting to die and of a prison preparing to execute him. The program, reported by ABC News correspondent Cynthia McFadden, takes viewers from the cellblock, to the execution chamber, to preparation of the lethal injection, and into the mind of inmate Antonio James as he prepares to pay the ultimate price for his crimes. The program offers a real-life portrait, putting a human face on...
Language
English
Description
Prison life is hard-but for most ex-convicts, life on the outside is tough, too. This video follows paroled prisoners as they re-enter civilian life and face challenges both large and small. Upon release from jail, the lives of these young men are suddenly filled with critical decisions. Some are dreaded, such as the split-second choice of whether or not to engage in violence-the wrong choice will put them back behind bars. Other dilemmas are unexpected,...
Language
English
Description
The Supreme Court's landmark decision that it is unconstitutional to execute people who are mentally retarded reverses decades of jurisprudence. In this program, ABC News correspondent John Donvan visits the ongoing legal battle that prompted the initial 1980 ruling, the case of Texas convict John Paul Penry. Argument rages not over Penry's guilt but what determines mental retardation. Commenting on the case are Joe Price, prosecutor in all of Penry's...
Language
English
Description
This program, filmed at the Central Correctional Institution in South Carolina, examines the failure of current U.S. correctional methods, and the expense of that failure in human terms. Interviews with inmates and staff capture emotions ranging from rage to hopelessness, as they discuss the racism and violence indigenous to prison life. The overall picture is that a growing underclass is disproportionately punished under our current criminal justice...
Language
English
Description
In 1994, voters sent a clear message to Congress: focus on punishment through harsher and longer sentences. But since even a life sentence does not necessarily translate into a life behind bars, society is expected to assimilate paroled ex-convicts who have had little or no rehabilitation. In this program, ABC News anchor Ted Koppel examines the case of James Pope III-sentenced on two counts of murder and armed robbery, but eligible for parole in...