A film by Carol Jacobsen
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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.
