Getting Out

David Bagnall and George C. Stoney, 2005, 58 minutes

F.R.E.E. Film Forum

A documentary film by David Bagnall and George Stoney featuring current inmates from New York's Sing Sing Correctional Facility as well as former inmates attempting to reestablish their lives after years of incarceration. Inspired by the Rehabilitation Through the Arts theater workshop program at Sing Sing, the film examines the importance of creativity and artistic expression both inside and outside the prison walls.

 "There are two and a quarter million people behind bars in the U.S. About 600,000 are due for release in the next 12 months, most of them with no preparation for what awaits them on the outside. It isn't surprising that more than half will be behind bars again within another year — back to the only security they know."

Up the Ridge

F.R.E.E. Film Forum, Dir. Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby, 2008, 60 min.

Up the Ridge is a one-hour television documentary produced by Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby. In 1999 Szuberla and Kirby were volunteer DJ’s for the Appalachian region’s only hip-hop radio program in Whitesburg, KY when they received hundreds of letters from inmates transferred into nearby Wallens Ridge, the region’s newest prison built to prop up the shrinking coal economy. The letters described human rights violations and racial tension between staff and inmates. Filming began that year and, though the lens of Wallens Ridge State Prison, the program offers viewers an in-depth look at the United States prison industry and the social impact of moving hundreds of thousands of inner-city minority offenders to distant rural outposts. The film explores competing political agendas that align government policy with human rights violations, and political expediencies that bring communities into racial and cultural conflict with tragic consequences. Connections exist, in both practice and ideology, between human rights violations in Abu Ghraib and physical and sexual abuse recorded in American prisons.