In Brett Story’s documentary The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, the camera journeys across the country, pausing in ordinary places where prisons affect our lives in ways so subtle that they almost seem invisible. In the film’s opening, we hear voices brimming with love, strained from loss, fragile with regret—sending messages to loved ones.
“God loves you, and you know your Grandma does.”
“All is well with the girls.”
“Went fishing yesterday morning. Caught a couple of catfish …”
As I watch, I am transported back to the summer of 1971, when I spent time in jail, charged with possession of heroin with intent to distribute and possession of a needle and syringe. At age 21, I was a drug user, not a supplier. Yet I still wound up a felon.
I am transported back in time because while in that jail cell in Charlotte, North Carolina, I missed the kind of ordinariness these people speak of. Braiding my daughter’s hair. Opening the refrigerator and choosing what to eat. The phone calls with my mother.
The tender messages that open the film also remind us that a multitude of people are affected when one human being is incarcerated.
Instead of sledgehammering its message, this film makes your heart bleed drip by drip as the story slowly unfolds.
On the screen, orange flames soar, accompanied by the voice of a woman, the member of an all-female firefighting crew, who eventually says, “The only way you know I’m a prison firefighter is if I tell you.” She says some people, amazed to find they all are women, try to talk to them. But the women are not allowed to respond. And I am reminded of all the ways people who are incarcerated are rendered voiceless, of how long it took me to overcome the shame that choked my own voice.
Another landscape comes into focus, and everything appears ordinary. But one of the pillars of incarceration is the disruption of ordinariness. And to maintain this separation, there are countless rules, always changing.
[For more of this story, written by Patrice Gaines, go to http://www.yesmagazine.org/iss...-done-to-us-20170718]
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