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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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This book describes the different job opportunities and requirements for the corrections system, designed to help administer the punishment process securely, humanely, effectively, and with a view toward someday returning the criminal to a productive life in society.
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...