Convicted: A Prison Diary
A film by
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2006, 10 minutes
Distributed by Carol Jacobsen
In this short film, award-winning social documentary artist Carol
Jacobsen provides a shocking glimpse into the inhuman conditions in what
Amnesty International has named one of the worst women's prisons in the
United States. By combining aerial, exterior and interior views of
Robert Scott Correctional Facility for Women with voiceover excerpts of
an inmate's letters, Jacobsen depicts a truly haunting portrait of life
behind bars. The film demonstrates why Jacobsen herself has chosen to
serve as Coordinator of the Michigan Women's Clemency Project,
advocating for the human rights of women prisoners and seeking freedom
for women wrongly incarcerated. We pair the video with an analytic
essay by Rebecca Young, a Barnard faculty member who first saw the film
in the context of the multimedia group show "Disturbing the Peace" that
Jacobsen curated in the spring of 2006 at Denise Bibro Fine Art in New
York City. Co-sponsored by Amnesty International USA, the show coincided
with Amnesty's campaign against human rights abuses in U.S. women's
prisons. As Young points out, Jacobsen's art, as well as the activist project
that it advances, requires a rethinking of the crucial concepts that
sustain the criminal justice system, and an analysis of gender is
indispensable to this rethinking.
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