A PRISON IN THE FIELDS
A PRISON IN THE FIELDS
Directed / Produced by Ashley Hunt
The Corrections Documentary Project
2001 / 18 minutes
Asking one of the biggest questions surrounding today's prison expansion — Where do new prisons get built? — this 20-minute documentary explores the how and why new prisons are being built and why they are typically placed in remote, rural communities, produced with Critical Resistance.
Since most communities do not want prisons built within them, the state has turned to impoverished rural communities, promoting new prisons to them as a promise of jobs and new “economic development,” as if a prison were a new factory or plant — even though decades of studies and experience show this not to be the case.
A PRISON IN THE FIELDS pictures one such town, an impoverished rural community in central California, which is about to get its second California state prison in ten years, built on fallowed agricultural land. While most community members have no idea about the planned prison, others have been told it will be an “economic driver.” This film also documents an important coming together of California’s growing anti-prison movement and its environmental justice — identifying prisons, prison economies and ecologies as both socially and environmentally toxic.
This film has been a useful tool for communities being confronted with a new prison plan, to see the difference between how a prison is sold and it’s real, likely impact, and its lessons are still relevant today. For further reading on the issue today, including how this movement has led not only to stopping new prisons but also closing existing ones, download this free newspaper on the Close California Prisons Campaign.
SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Rose Braz & Critical Resistance
Jean Flores
Caroline Farrel & the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment
Esmerelda Martinez
Friends of the Kangaroo Rat
