(soft piano music) - [Ben Jones] One purpose of prisons in this country is to incapacitate and to take out of the community particular individuals who are seen as a threat.

- [Gopal Balachandran] A lot of the significant sort of growth in the prison population was a product of a much more modern era.

- [Joshua Miller] We dehumanize incarcerated people by removing that sense of a future that could be different than the present.

- [Mercer Gary] Education itself can be a significant source of pride and confidence that is often stripped of people as they're incarcerated.

- [Shaheen Pasha] It's about making sure that when people return to the fray, that they're not worse off than they were before.

- [Chanell Burnette] I do not know what purpose prisons actually serve these days.

It certainly has not rehabilitated the majority.

- [Tariq MaQbool] In here, human beings are mistreated every single day under the auspices of law and order.

- [Kory "Hussain" McClary] It's too much and every man's reality is different.

Out of everything I fear losing my mind the most in here.

- [Tariq MaQbool] Prison is a cancer for relationships.

By design, it is subversive for any sort of connections because it is geared towards isolating people.

And for us in prison, nothing fills the gap of losing connections to our loved ones.

- [Ben Jones] We're all part of community.

And how we define ourselves as individuals is necessarily tied to our communities.

- Absolutely impossible to live as an individual, Aristotle said that such a person would be either a God or a monster.

- [Mercer Gary] If we understand community as a web of relationships, then when a thread of that fabric is removed, there are gaps.

So the loss of community members and especially continued losses of community members over time can really strain the relationships that remain and leave holes in people's lives.

- The United States has always had a peculiar approach to punishment.

- [Narrator of Film] At the beginning of the 1800s, jails were used for vagrants and beggars, and to hold persons awaiting trial, but generally not for punishment.

However, when Pennsylvania reduced the number of offenses with a death penalty to one, it prescribed imprisonment for other serious offenses.

- [Joshua Miller] It's a mixture of waves of rehabilitative thinking with deeply punitive, vengeful values.

- [Narrator of Film] The penitentiary concept was an American contribution to the criminal justice process.

It was invented as a more humane alternative to capital and corporal punishment, and as a means of providing the criminal an opportunity to reform his ways.

- [Ben Jones] The word penitentiary derives from penitent, to be repentant of what you did.

And so that was one of the original ideas behind prison, is that you would take someone out of society.

You would use the prison setting to reform them, to make them a better person.

- [Joshua Miller] When we invented the prison, we did so with reform and rehabilitation in mind.

It was Quakers in Philadelphia who aimed to create a form of punishment that primarily focused on prayer, and labor, and solitude.

And they were trying to replace much more punitive forms of punishment when they did that.

When slavery was abolished in the United States, by the 13th amendment, an exception was put into the amendment for people who had been convicted of a crime, and formerly enslaved people were frequently convicted of the crime of failing to work on the plantations, where they had been enslaved, they were incarcerated briefly and then leased out to those plantations where they could be forced to work under the 13th amendment, and did.

When convict leasing was finally abolished in the 1930s, the reincarceration of African-Americans continues inside the prison.

Prisoners who are incarcerated under these conditions are maintaining the facilities in which they are incarcerated.

In the United States, the number of people incarcerated through the 1960s is dropping precipitously.

80% of them are released on parole well short of the period to which they were sentenced.

That means that prisons almost had achieved the rehabilitative ideal.

And it's precisely at that moment, crime begins to rise and sentences begin to rise.

Parole is granted with less frequency.

There are a number of different scares and moral panics around crime.

And suddenly the number of people incarcerated starts to skyrocket.

- [Narrator Of Ad] In recent years, crime in this country has grown nine times as fast as population.

At the current rate, the crimes of violence in America will double by 1972.

- But today with 2.3 million people in prison, it's clear that that model, designed with reform in mind, has become a new form of deeply punitive punishment.

- [Narrator Of Ad] I pledge to you, the wave of crime is not going to be the wave of the future in America.

- Man is on trial for his life.

If there any more interruptions by the public I shall order the courtroom cleared.

- Well, there are sort of three main kind of classical approaches, I guess you could call them.

One is the theory of retribution, kind of like, "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

One is a deterrent function, which is that if you punish the individual in a particular crime, that'll prevent further crimes from occurring.

And there's a final one, which is rehabilitation, which is that you are trying to enable the individuals so that they're kind of cured in a way of whatever ails them in terms of addiction or mental health issues.

- [Kory "Hussain" McClary] I believe that the original purpose of prison in society was to correct misguided individuals so that they may be released back into society as productive members.

Now, the criminal system's role is in question.

People are sent here for revenge, politics, punishment, but it seems like correction is not on the list.

- [Ben Jones] One purpose of prisons in this country is to serve a retributive role.

So someone does something wrong, you want them to experience some harm as result of the wrong that they did, the preferred method is usually sticking them in prison.

- [Joshua Miller] It's divorced from ideas about what is good for the broader society as a whole, as well as what could potentially be good for the individual itself.

And it's not clear what purpose is actually being served outside of just warehousing them.

To my mind, that's like the classic retributive approach.

There's no deterrent function and there is also no rehabilitative aspect to it as well.

- [Richard Nixon] This growth of a hardened criminal class has partly been the result of misplaced government priorities and a misguided social philosophy.

At the root of this philosophy, lies utopian presumptions about human nature and that society, not the individual, is to blame.

- [Mercer Gary] We don't need to deny that there is significant harm that people cause to one another.

But we do also need to recognize that that harm doesn't occur in a vacuum and that there are significant social and structural factors that play into any individual act of harm.

Theft doesn't occur outside of a system that creates a significant socioeconomic inequality.

A retributive model, neglects all of that by locating the burden of the harm on the individual who caused it and treating that individual as the sole source of the harm.

- So I don't want to ask what made them do this.

They must be taken off the street.

- [Mercer Gary] Because of retributive model doesn't get at the root causes of the harm that we experience, it can't provide a sense of deep healing or ongoing change that both rebuilds communities that have been affected and that changes society for the better in the future.

- When this bill is law, three strikes and you're out will be the law of the land.

The penalty for killing a law enforcement officer will be death.

(crowd applauds) This day is the beginning, not the end of our effort to restore safety and security to the people of this country.

(crowd applauds) - [Joshua Miller] There is widespread dispute about what caused mass incarceration in the United States.

One thing is clear is that it wasn't always this way.

- [Gopal Balachandran] The research that has been amassed shows that a lot of the significant sort of growth in the prison population was a product of a much more modern era than it was a feature of, say, even the forties, and fifties and sixties.

And even policing for that matter.

The way that it occurs now is very different than what had occurred 50, 60, a hundred years ago.

- Encounters with he blue and white breed fear, frustration, and anger at a force that some say is bent more on intimidation than serving and protecting.

- [Ben Jones] Policing in the United States has an interesting history.

And it's one that's intertwined with sort of our broader development as a country and especially historic injustices that dominated our history.

- [Crowd] NYPD keep your hands off me!

- [Gopal Balachandran] It's the police that have the discretion at the entry level what kind of charges are a kind of crime.

They're like the initial gatekeepers, right, into the criminal justice system.

So there's a significant impact that police officers do have on rates of incarceration, on mass incarceration, to a certain extent, as well.

There's a sense that I get that police officers, they sort of feel like we just are gonna charge someone and we're gonna pass the buck onto someone else.

And the problem is, is that it's always the easy decision.

You charge someone with a crime and let someone else make the decision.

And then they kind of are shuttled off into the system.

And once it's in the system, then it's very hard to get out of it.

- [Narrator] On a per capita basis, the United States has more people behind bars than any other country in the world.

And a lot of the sentences are insanely long.

- [Joshua Miller] Sometimes we talk about sentencing practices as another major contributor to mass incarceration in the U.S. and this is key.

In the early 1970s, the average prosecutor would be presented with someone who had been arrested for a crime and would choose to arraign, to indict, to proceed to trial with only about a third of those cases.

A decade later, something changed.

And it's hard for us to know exactly what changed, but prosecutors were getting more and more cases, and they were choosing to indict more like two thirds of those.

And they were asking their legislators for stricter sentences, longer, more punitive sentences with fewer opportunities for parole.

- What has happened is, is that you have large sentences that are given for a very serious crimes without an understanding of what could and what does have benefits to public safety and, correspondingly, what are the significant social and monetary costs from taking an individual out of their community and putting them in a box somewhere else?

I think what a sentencing judge would say is, is that we are trying to recognize each and every individual victim of a crime, but of course, that results into absurdities where someone is sentenced to 150 years.

And someone is also sentenced to multiple life sentences when clearly that cannot be served.

Once more, you know, it is consistent with a retrospective approach.

- [Judge] Sir, I'm giving you 175 years, which is 2100 months.

I've just signed your death warrant.

- [Joshua Miller] A sentence that is longer than your lifespan, longer than all the time you've spent on this planet, is inconceivable, don't have a reference point.

And prisons themselves are isolating, they're full of the threat of violence, and the impact that that has on your hopes for yourself, the way that you think about your future, the way that you think about life itself, is difficult to overstate.

It is a kind of, long-term psychological torture.

- [Gopal Balachandran] One of the real arguments for why life without parole is so problematic because it assumes that individuals are set in stone and that they are incapable of ever changing or being productive members of society.

And it takes away something which I think is probably the most devastating aspect of the criminal justice system, is that it takes away someone's hope.

- [Inmate] I was sentenced to 1010 years and 19 life terms for armed bank robbery.

I won't go up for parole until Jesus has come back first.

- [Joshua Miller] There are two ways in which we dehumanize incarcerated people.

One, is by removing that sense of a future that could be different than the present, a future where one will be worthy of dignity and be restored to membership in the community.

- Come here, Jones!

- [Joshua Miller] The other is by constantly subjecting them to the threat of mistreatment, violence, and the deprivation of their dignity... - Open it up.

- Joshua Miller] By reminding them that they can never be worthy of positive fellow feeling.

- Asleep, eh?

Well, I'll learn him how to run away.

- [Joshua Miller] It's something that wears away at your sense of self.

- If I lay my hands on that boy, the Lord will strike me dead.

- Won't take orders, eh?

- [Ben Jones] In terms of how do we sort of move beyond the retributive model?

I think one way to do it is we need to think about the full range of harms and benefits that something like prison has.

- I served six years in prison for robbery, which is a violent crime.

Upon my release in 2000, I worked extremely hard to restore my life.

It was extremely difficult though, because of 44,000 collateral consequences, many resulting from the crime bill you previously supported.

- We need a lot more support for people who are coming out.

Job training, education, housing, the kinds of community supports that will enable you to really get your life back on track and to make a contribution.

- [Ben Jones] In the past 10, 15 years, you've seen sort of a growing consensus across the political spectrum that mass incarceration is a bad idea.

Just confronting the reality of the multitude of harms that come from the current prison system that we have, I think can help propel this conversation and lead to some change.

- [Kory "Hussain" McClary] There are programs here that talk about the steps to take to correct your behavior but there are only groups and only talks.

After the group, you're back in the atmosphere and negativity.

Most people don't want you to correct your behavior.

I believe that to change the prison system, we need a hands on approach so that at least can see the change that we're working towards.

- [Shaheen Pasha]] Right now you still have this prevalent attitude that, "I don't care about people that go behind bars, they're bad.

And so why should my taxpayer dollars go towards giving them an education?"

You know, "Why do they get school?"

"Why do they get college?"

"Why should they get anything?"

I think that definitely someone's gonna look at this and say, "Well, what about the victims?"

With the current system the way it is, it's about punishment.

And there is some, some justice does come out of that.

Some relief comes out of that, but at the end of the day, the pain is still there for both the victims and for the person who's perpetrated the crime.

- [Ben Jones] Education generally is one way that is fairly well recognized for sort of transforming oneself, rehabilitating oneself.

- [Shaheen Pasha] Prison education at both the associate's, bachelor's, and postgraduate level have tremendous benefits to people while they're incarcerated, as well as after they come home.

- [Joshua Miller] The soul knows no bars and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, the imposition of academic and scholarly norms on a carceral space allow incarcerated people, incarcerated students, to come to develop a part of themselves that's been suppressed.

They can be equals with the greatest philosophers in the world when they read their work and contest it.

They can learn about places that they may never see, and they can join a community of fellow students that share that commitment and that are working to better themselves in this particular way.

I truly do believe that the liberal arts are techniques for freedom, that education is the best escape plan.

- [Mercer Gary] The vast majority of people who are incarcerated will be coming home at some point.

Education itself has a real role in building back a self that has been diminished by the carceral system.

It also has really tangible material results in its effect on employment after re-entry.

Prison education helps to reduce recidivism generally by about 43%.

It is also therefore a change in the stability of communities.

- [Chanell Burnette] There's so much that people do not know about what we endure inside these walls.

The system is dehumanizing because once you're inside, you lose your individuality.

You are then grouped, categorized as simply a number, not a face, not a person with feelings, only a seven digit number and a last name.

It hurts to be regarded in such a way.

- [Shaheen Pasha] The vast majority of journalism that is written about mass incarceration comes from the outside.

Those stories are what so much policy is based on.

One of the things that Prison Journalism Project wants to do is to break down some of those barriers.

Having people that live inside prison day-to-day that understand what happens at night, when the lights go on and the doors lock, those are the types of stories that are missing.

And what we want to do is provide incarcerated journalists with the tools and training, to be able to tell those stories.

I shouldn't be telling those stories.

Those should be told by the people who are living it, but they just have never had the opportunity.

- [Tariq MaQbool] PJP provides an avenue to be heard for people who are kept voiceless.

Towards that endeavor, PJP is an amplifier for the pleadings of the captives and their human rights.

Personally, writing on the PJP platform makes me feel heard, alive, and having purpose.

I feel as if I'm a real person and not some meaningless number or statistic on a chart.

- [Shaheen Pasha] When they're published in a mainstream press, it is a huge accomplishment.

When you do have "Washington Post", or "New York Times", or a "San Francisco Public Press", or any of these types of mainstream publications take an interest, it really shows them that it goes beyond this echo chamber of people that are interested in mass incarceration.

It shows that there is an audience that will hear from them, and that their stories matter, and that their stories are just as important as anyone on the outside.

So what you find is it builds a community as well, because it's a link to the outside world.

And for people that have been disenfranchised for such a long time, it's hugely important.

And it actually helps them to have a lifeline to the outside world.

- [C-SPAN Speaker] The United States comprises just 5% of the world's population.

We incarcerate almost a quarter of its prisoners.

And I understood that few of these challenges were more pressing than the need to strengthen the federal criminal justice system, and to reduce, reduce America's over-reliance on incarceration.

- Restorative models of justice are looking at really rebuilding and repairing the relationships that are central to communities in order to be able to hold each other accountable and to set standards for living well together that can be relied on.

There are two parts really to restorative and transformative approaches to justice.

There's first, the redirection of funds and resources towards social services that help people meet their basic needs for housing, for food, for healthcare, for mental health care, in particular, and redirecting money that is currently going to fund our extremely costly prison system, instead towards these services that meet people's needs and help reduce harm in the first place.

There are then also processes of community conferencing, restorative circles, and various other ways of structuring ongoing conversations that both seek to bring accountability to the person who's caused harm and some measure of healing to the person or people who've experienced harm.

- [Ben Jones] Prisons are oftentimes very invisible to many people in the population, you know?

Stick them off in a rural areas where not a lot of people are around.

And there may not be a lot of interaction between the prison population and the surrounding communities.

And so I think when something is really invisible in society, it's very easy for those harms to continue without many people being troubled by it.

And with anything else in society, you have to do the hard work of organizing, and bringing attention to those stories, and fighting for political change that can make those voices louder.

- We've done it because we felt like that the fellows needed something.

And if we did a concert at a prison and we came and did it on our own, at our own expense, in our own time, then surely somebody out there would know that somebody out there cares.

And we care.

(audience cheers) - [Joshua Miller] We have to confront the vengeful impulse inside ourselves.

We have to overcome the desire to find scapegoats, to identify people who deserve to never have their freedom, and to see the fellow citizen, the fellow human being, inside of everyone who we encounter.

- So I just want you to know that we care for you and that as human beings, that we're all of the human family, and that I hope to see a lot of you on the outside soon.

- [Mercer Gary] I think it's really important to foreground the voices of people who are or have been incarcerated and their close kin.

These people have significant experiences with the carceral system that tend to get pushed outside of the spotlight.

So I think those are absolutely essential practices.

So really underscoring the significant effects to both individual and community health and wellbeing are essential points in arguing against our current way of doing things.

- It's just been a lot of waiting and thinking of what I'm gonna do, you know, about my future.

And, you know, just so I could get with my family again.

I don't know, start a new life.

- [Joshua Miller] We have to not just see the worthiness inside of people who wronged us, but also confront the very real and specific policies that brought us here.

We need to find ways to regularly reconsider whether someone's incarceration still benefits them, their victim, or the community.

And we need to much more regularly conclude that the answer is no.

- One day I was introduced to a new concept, restorative justice and a community of individuals who believe all humans have value.

This new community showed me that there was a different way, a community where we work to build each other up, not tear each other down.

We began to heal and I realized that healed people heal people.

(soft jazz music)