CORRECTIONS

CORRECTIONS
Directed / Produced by Ashley Hunt
The Corrections Documentary Project
2001 / 56 Minutes

“Corrections is a glaring cry for justice for the befallen, for the poor, for all who believe in justice.”
— Rod Hewitt, Roughcut

“Corrections is a glaring cry for justice for the befallen, for the poor, for all who believe in justice.”
— Rod Hewitt, Roughcut

CORRECTIONS was the first documentary to directly take on the system of what is now called “mass incarceration,” produced between 1998 and 2001 as the U.S. prison population was reaching the globally unprecedented milestone of two million people behind bars. Made in close dialogue with grassroots organizations and communities on the front lines of the system’s effects, the story has unfortunately maintained its relevance and urgency in the decades since.

Featuring Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Judy Greene, Rose Braz, and many others key to shaping today’s movement for prison abolition, Corrections visits a prison trade-show, communities affected by U.S. prison expansion, and profiles the two primary private prison corporations, who have since rebranded themselves as Geo and Core Civic — today’s major beneficiaries of Trump-era immigration enforcement.

**

CORRECTIONS is a story of justice turned to profit, where the ‘war on crime’ has found new investors: venture capital and for-profit prisons. A story of how private prisons have returned to help grow the larger prison industrial complex.

CORRECTIONS is a story of profits and mass imprisonment: how the histories of racial and economic inequality in the U.S. are emerging today from the walls of its prisons, and how this crisis has formed the incentive, profit and resource base for an entire industry.

Where the Tough-on-Crime political movement meets the ending of welfare, finance capital, globalization, the War on Terrorism and neoliberal policy-making, CORRECTIONS explores how prisons have fast become the accepted solution to unemployment and housing crises, crumbled schools, livable wages without credit and the undoing of the Western Social Contract, set within the scene of collapsed rural economies and the "urban decay" of potentially expensive neighborhoods.

CORRECTIONS takes you to:

  • A prison trade show & the corporate headquarters of leading prison corporations;

  • A poor community enticed to host a new prison for "economic development";

  • A timeline of the Tough-on-Crime movement, following its emergence during the Civil Rights Movement, people’s movements, the War on Drugs and into political “common sense”;

  • A Southern community alive with the memory of for-profit prisons from the last century, which is still struggling for justice today;

  • A juvenile prison where violent defiance of human rights are perpetrated upon children as young as thirteen years old...

Featuring stories of the leading correctional corporations, testimony from the world's leading experts and the lives of ordinary people, CORRECTIONS takes audiences behind the walls of the prison system that Wall Street has called a “growth industry.”