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In an era when no other industrialized Western nation enforces a death penalty, America has executed an average of 39 convicts per year over the past decade. Is it a just punishment? Is it even a deterrent? In this Emmy Award-winning program, ABC News anchor Ted Koppel seeks to understand the paradoxical nature of the death penalty-not in theory, but in practice, as he follows Mario Marquez from Death Row to his execution, along with Marquez' attorney...
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Every Wednesday another busload of new inmates arrives at the Western Youth Institution in Morganton, North Carolina, a maximum security prison for juvenile offenders. What trade-offs do the convicts have to make, just to stay alive in this hostile environment? And what will they be like if they eventually make it back into society? In this program, ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer reports on prison life through the experiences of four new teenage inmates-one...
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In the Ventura School, California's showcase juvenile prison, inmates discuss how drugs and alcohol, lack of family support, and gang involvement have influenced their lives. The program also looks at Adult Time For Adult Crime, a program in Dade County, FL, which sends more kids to adult court than any other county in the U.S. Those who prosecute, defend, and judge young offenders explain how our society has come to the point where the age of the...
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Filmed over the course of a year, this documentary goes inside Glen Mills Schools in Pennsylvania, a "boarding school" alternative to prison for about 1,000 young members of street gangs convicted of crimes. Sam Ferrainola, the school's director, has pioneered a system of rewards and privileges where the young men keep themselves under strict surveillance, reporting infractions of the rules to upperclassmen, or "Big Brothers." Ferrainola stresses...
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Many Americans believe that only stiffer penalties will deter kids from committing crimes. But is this true? In this three-segment program, ABC News anchor Ted Koppel uses interviews with rehabilitation advocates and case studies of young offenders to publicize the promising efforts of facilities such as the Holden Ranch for Boys, in California, while underscoring the urgent need for locked juvenile mental health facilities for young convicts requiring...
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This group of four animated programs provocatively traces the ways and means in which justice has been applied to women in Western society. Blind Justice was cheered at the San Francisco Film Festival as an imaginative antidote to complacent attitudes towards women's rights. All Men Are Created Equal traces the origins of many basic concepts of Western law to ancient Greece and shows just how unequal men and women are before the law. Someone Must...
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This program traces the history of world criminal justice from the Code of Hammurabi, through ancient Greece and Rome, to the Middle Ages. It covers such topics as criminal justice in India, China, Japan, and the Middle East; English debtors' prisons; punishments for colonial witchcraft; the development of criminology; and modern criminal justice systems.
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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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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...
10) Kids behind bars
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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 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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No one yearns to experience the inside of a prison-but to understand the American criminal justice system and those who enter it at an early age, spending a couple of nights behind bars yields powerful results. This ABC News program is the product of unprecedented access to Arizona's juvenile correction facilities, documenting six months in the lives of inmates between 12 and 17 years old. Although the settings can be violent, the young interviewees...
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Humanity has a pivotal, long-term role in the health of our planet and global community. Carl Anthony of Oakland, California tells how the universe story expanded his understanding of race and environmental justice. With a focus on urban and metropolitan areas, he explains the practical implications of a functional cosmology for sustainable community development.
16) Death Row U.S.A
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Huntsville, Texas, a friendly, bucolic university town, is also known as "The Execution Capital of the World." This sobering program takes a close look at both sides of Huntsville, as it profiles deceased inmates Bettie Lou Beets, Billy George Hughes, and Timothy Gribble. Interviews with Huntsville's mayor, prison officials, legal counsel, victims' family members, former inmates, death penalty advocates and opponents, and, only days before his execution,...
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The math, according to many experts, is simple: it costs $75,000 a year to incarcerate a nonviolent offender but only $5,000 to help that individual live productively in freedom. Meanwhile, the number of Americans behind bars has reached an astonishing level with virtually no sign of falling. This film explores the troubling realities that lie behind those statistics-the revolving door of institutionalization, the complexities of reform, and the frequent...
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How sane must a convict be to face execution? And is justice served if medicine is forcibly administered so that a convict is sane enough to face the death penalty? The cases of Death Row inmates Horace Kelly and Charles Singleton have severely tried the practical and moral boundaries of capital punishment. In this program, ABC News anchor Forrest Sawyer; Richard Mazer, defense counsel for Kelly; Dr. Paul Applebaum, director of the law and psychiatry...
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Former Rutgers University student Dharun Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in prison for using a webcam to spy on his gay roommate who later jumped to his death from a bridge. NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown and The New York Times' Kate Zernike discuss the ruling and its implications. Origina?
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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...