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The Prison in Twelve Landscapes

More people are imprisoned in the United States than at any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself is rarely seen beyond the medias lens of crime and punishment. Filmmaker and geographer Brett Story explores the ecology of incarceration, traveling the American landscape to excavate the unseen aspects of how prisons are imbedded in our social, economic, political, and natural landscape. In California, a female inmate is enlisted to help fight raging forest fires but is forbidden from speaking to endangered homeowners; elsewhere, a warehouse inventory of canned goods, socks, and cassette tapes reveals the thriving entrepreneurial model of sending approved care packages to loved ones behind bars. The films unique strategy of employing negative space - this is a prison film in which we never see a prison - serves to question the effects that prison and prisoners have on our immediate environments, and how the lives of unseen populations are implicated in our very own, often in ways that are related more to economic development than proverbial justice.

"An ingenious, prismatic approach subtly and artfully registers how mass incarceration affects society in ways the public cant always see." Variety

"Fascinating. An unsentimental look at the ways prisons shape life outside their walls." Hollywood Reporter