ABOUT
Still from Double Time (2021)
The Corrections Documentary Project began in the late 1990s as artist and filmmaker, Ashley Hunt, began his research into the extraordinary growth of the U.S. prison system. At that time, it was the largest in the world in both size and incarceration rate, and it was about to reach the milestone of two million people imprisoned, as Angela Davis had coined the term “the prison industrial complex.” Studying the criminalization of poverty, the targeting of communities of color, and the industry of state and private interests that had grown themselves tough-on-crime culture and the War on Drugs since the liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s, Hunt’s experimented with video installations and writing, culminating in his first feature documentary, CORRECTIONS in 2001.
Focused on a prison system growing for reasons other than justice, CORRECTIONS was made in dialogue with communities and grassroots organizations on the front lines of the system. The film found a useful place within the movement that some of these same groups were building — against mass incarceration, but more importantly for liberation and the vision of abolition. a grassroots tour of the film around the U.S.
The project evolved as Hunt was invited to produce works for campaigns and organizing efforts along the way, making up videos that became FOOTNOTES ON CORRECTIONS. Hunt began to produce MAPS made as popular education materials from the project’s ongoing research; along with other PROJECTS he’s continued to produce to this day, including films, photography, installations, and writings in the decades since.
Installation shot showing three FOOTNOTES in an installation of the full project, in an exhibition To Shoot a Kite, at Cue Art Center, New York, 2015
FOOTNOTES ON CORRECTIONS are a series of short films that Hunt made in the years following the release of CORRECTIONS. Including campaigns to close prisons and boot camps for kids, to stop new prisons from being built, and histories of state violence and abandonment from Attica to Hurricane Katrina, as well as community discussions in a union shop and a public housing project
Hunt’s MAPS are of attempts to give a visual form to structures in the world that are hard to see because they are made invisible or they are spread across geographies that a single eye cannot see. The connective tissues of the prison industrial complex, its historical transformation out of war and welfare state institutions, the production of statelessness, and the myths of capitalist development that came to narrate the 2008 financial crisis.
This same goal of describing what can’t be seen carries into Hunt’s other related projects, as he originally charted it out in his essay on the “disappearance and reappearance of the prison,” which tracks the visual erasure of prisons from daily life even as they continue to grow in number around us. It animates Degrees of Visibility, whose 260 landscape photographs show but a fraction of the U.S.’ archipelago of imprisonment and camps, theorizing invisibility as a technique of mass incarceration; its continuation through his project Hostile Territory: Between Inside and Out, which studies how counter insurgency and war-making are hidden within today’s prisons; and Hunt’s trilogy on abolition, through the lens of prison closure and the community imagining of what will replace them, which includes Ashes Ashes, Double Time, and And Water Brings Tomorrow. .
While The Corrections Documentary Project began simply as a single, feature documentary on the privatization of prisons, an industry that relies upon a growing number of people imprisoned for its profits, that initial lens opens onto less obvious incentives and engines for its growth, including political economic relationships, cultural processes, and historical legacies that use captivity as a way to balance the economy, to extract from communities, to erase people and histories while extracting from them, to enable forms of domination, control and privilege — throughout all of which we see a prisons system growing for reasons other than “justice.”
And while the project attempts to describe these hard-to-see systems, it has also shown from its beginning the people’s movements fighting hard against them, who are the true experts of the system and the agents working to transform our carceral world into new worlds.
Publicity Still from And Water Brings Tomorrow (2025)
Regrettably, after 25 years, the Corrections Documentary Project has not become obsolete, for while the incredible gains of this movement have transformed a great deal, the system continues to shape shift and find new avenues of growth by which to expand its gulag archipelago. This project remains committed to telling these stories, so please contact us with questions or to use the project’s tools in your own organizing, classrooms, or for personal education.
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