Related Guides
Prison Radio
- Inside Wire: Colorado Prison Radio Inside Wire: Colorado Prison Radio beams music, stories, information, and entertainment into prisons across Colorado… and broadcasts its sounds to listeners outside facilities as well, across the U.S. and beyond. Our programs are created by incarcerated media producers for incarcerated listeners. Inside Wire is a program of the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative, in collaboration with the Colorado Department of Corrections. It's the first statewide prison radio station in
Film Databases & Podcast Series
- Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online delivers more than 67,000 titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. It includes documentaries, films, demonstrations, and other content types.
- Kanopy This link opens in a new window Kanopy is a provider of documentaries, training films, and theatrical releases available as streaming video. Clips from the videos can be embedded in presentations or shown in class. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- BU Libraries Search This link opens in a new window BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of research material provided by the library. Resources covered by the search includes books and eBooks, journals, scores and sheet music, video and audio recordings, and other physical and electronic items held by the library. Coverage encompasses materials relating to the prehistoric and antique world through to the present.
Podcast Series
- Criminalized Created by a BU student, Criminalized is a podcast that examines issues in the American criminal justice system through the narratives of formerly incarcerated people. This podcast brings together the perspectives of court-involved people, community organizers, policy experts, and academics to explain the drivers of mass incarceration in the United States. Criminalized is based in Boston, MA and focuses on the experiences of people in the Massachusetts criminal legal system.
- Ear Hustle The Ear Hustle team works in the San Francisco Bay Area, both in San Quentin State Prison’s media lab and from offices on the outside, to produce stories that are sometimes difficult, often funny and always honest. Episodes offer a nuanced view of people involved with the American prison system and those reintegrating into society after serving time.
- Caught Mass incarceration starts young. These kids say the system changes them forever.
- The Appeal: Justice in America Justice In America is hosted by Josie Duffy Rice, president of The Appeal, along with guest hosts Darnell Moore, Donovan X. Ramsey, Derecka Purnell, and Zak Cheney Rice. Each episode explains a new criminal justice issue and features conversations with experts and advocates.
- Life of a Lifer This podcast tells the world about what happens to those serving long terms in prison, about those serving life sentences without parole, how they got there, what they are doing in there and what motivates them to keep on living for a better tomorrow.
- Wrongful Conviction Based on the files of the lawyers who freed them, Wrongful Conviction features interviews with men and women who have spent decades in prison for crimes they did not commit – some of them had even been sentenced to death. These are their stories.
- Live from D Block Live from D block is a prison based podcast, hosted by Ezekiel Thomas who has been incarcerated for 27 years.
- PEN America Works of Justice Works of Justice is an online series that features content connected to the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program, reflecting on the relationship between writing and incarceration, and presenting challenging conversations about criminal justice in the United States.
Individual Podcasts
- NPR Throughline: Mass Incarceration The United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world, and a disproportionate number of those prisoners are Black. What are the origins of the U.S. criminal justice system and how did racism shape it? From the creation of the first penitentiaries in the 1800s, to the "tough-on-crime" prosecutors of the 1990s, how America created a culture of mass incarceration.
Featured Films
- Criminal Injustice: Death and Politics at Attica (streaming, Academic Video Online) In September of 1971, the infamous prison rebellion began at the Attica State Correctional Facility in upstate New York—a dramatic civil rights protest that ended with Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordering more than 600 state troopers to storm the prison and retake it with force.
- Life and Death Row (series) (streaming, Academic Video Online) Documentary series following the lives of young people awaiting capital punishment in the USA.
- The HistoryMakers video oral history with Bryan Stevenson Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative in 1994, a non-profit law center in Montgomery, Alabama focused on those condemned to the death penalty and children sentenced to life-without-parole penalties which disproportionately affect people of color, with disabilities, and the poor and marginalized.
- Incarceration Nation (streaming, Academic Video Online) The United States incarcerates a greater percentage of our population than any other nation - nearly 2.4 million Americans are behind bars, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $63 billion a year. Correspondent Martha Teichner looks into how that bleak statistic came about, and at efforts being made to change this.
- Solitary Confinement (streaming, Academic Video Online) The first-ever comprehensive investigation of the subject reveals what life is like for the 10% of inmates who serve their sentences in isolation. Today's penal system is in flux, as new theories of confinement, new technologies and a rising tide of convicts combine to change the way America handles prisoners.
- The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (streaming, Academic Video Online) In this remarkable documentary, filmmaker Brett Story excavates the often unseen links and connections that prisons – and our system of mass incarceration – have on communities and industries all around us. Widely acclaimed, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is an essential documentary, a portrait of our criminal justice system in which we never see a penitentiary.
- The 13th Amendment : how companies are turning prisons into cash cows (streaming, Academic Video Online) The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery-but it still remains legal under one condition. The amendment reads: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Today in America, big corporations profit of cheap prison labor in both privatized and state-run prisons.
- Prison Town, USA (streaming, Academic Video Online) In the 1990s, at the height of the prison-building boom, a prison opened in rural America every 15 days. "Prison Town, USA" tells the story of Susanville, California, one small town that tries to resuscitate its economy by building a prison — with unanticipated consequences.
- When the Bough Breaks-- Children of Women in Prison (streaming, Academic Video Online) hat happens to children when their mothers are incarcerated? In prisons throughout the United States, 80% of all female inmates are incarcerated for non-violent offenses, and 80% are mothers of vulnerable children. This sensitive documentary is an up -close look at children coping with their mother's incarcerations.
- Prison lullabies (streaming, Academic Video Online) Prison Lullabies is the remarkable portrait of four women living on the bad side of luck, struggling with drug addiction, arrested for dealing and prostitution and serving prison time with one common bond: they are pregnant. Amy, Monique, Joann and Ann Marie -- they all have given birth behind bars. For these women who are on intimate terms with sexual abuse, poverty and addiction, the Taconic Correctional Facility in New York State offers a rare gleam of hope. One of only five prisons in the U.S. to provide a nursery program for inmates,
- New Gulag (streaming, Academic Video Online) In the United States there are five thousand prisons and one and a half million prisoners. The prison system already costs thirty billion dollars per year to maintain and will escalate as stiffer sentences and tougher treatment are being demanded for criminals. Some estimate that half of all Americans will be incarcerated by the year 2050. This hard-hitting film shows that building and maintaining prisons has become an industry. Private companies are running them for profit often at the expense of any amenities such as recreation and rehabilitation services.
- Belly of the Beast (streaming, Alexander Street Press) When a courageous young woman and a radical lawyer discover a pattern of illegal sterilizations in California's women's prisons, they wage a near-impossible battle against the Department of Corrections. With a growing team of investigators inside prison working with colleagues on the outside, they uncover a series of statewide crimes -- from inadequate health care to sexual assault to coercive sterilizations -- primarily targeting women of color. This shocking legal drama captured over 7-years features extraordinary access and intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated people, demanding attention to a shameful and ongoing legacy of eugenics and reproductive injustice in the United States.
- A Black and White killing. Part 1 (streaming, Academic Video Online) eo-Nazi marches. Horrific mass murders. Widespread racist rhetoric. Dangerous white nationalism is on the rise across America - including in its prisons. This chilling documentary examines the threat posed by white supremacists in the US, and it asks: what lies behind far-right violence? Follow an investigation deep into the US penal system, where racist gangs recruit new members and order terrifying initiation killings. Meet the people affected by their violence. And hear from the people trying to bring them to justice. This is a stark look at racial hatred in an increasingly divided United States.
- A Black and White killing. Part 2 (streaming, Academic Video Online) Neo-Nazi marches. Horrific mass murders. Widespread racist rhetoric. Dangerous white nationalism is on the rise across America - including in its prisons. This chilling documentary examines the threat posed by white supremacists in the US, it and asks: what lies behind far-right violence? Follow an investigation deep into the US penal system, where racist gangs recruit new members and order terrifying initiation killings. Meet the people affected by their violence. And hear from the people trying to bring them to justice. This is a stark look at racial hatred in an increasingly divided United States.
- The Human Stories Behind Mass Incarceration (TED Talk) The United States locks up more people than any other country in the world, says documentarian Eve Abrams, and somewhere between one and four percent of those in prison are likely innocent. That's 87,000 brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers -- predominantly African American -- unnecessarily separated from their families, their lives and dreams put on hold. Using audio from her interviews with incarcerated people and their families, Abrams shares touching stories of those impacted by mass incarceration and calls on us all to take a stand and ensure that the justice system works for everyone.
- The Last Graduation (streaming, Kanopy) Researcher Barbara Zahm gives a brief history of the 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion in which forty-three men died, and the college prison program which was initiated afterward. After interviews with prison inmates, "The Movement for College Programs of New York State Prisons After Attica" was formed. Zahm tells of her transformation after working with the inmates and her anguish over the Congressional decision to eliminate Pell Grants for prisoners, thus ending the program and leading to the "Last Graduation". As of 1997 funding cuts had not been restored.
- Frontline: Prison State (streaming, Academic Video Online) Prison State takes an intimate look at the cycle of mass incarceration in America and a statewide effort to reverse the trend, following four residents of a housing project in Louisville, KY. as they cycle in and out of jail and prison.
- Mass Incarceration: How Racial Inequality Shapes Criminal Justice (Youtube) EJI is pleased to release this complete video of Mass Incarceration: How Racial Inequality Shapes Criminal Justice, which was recorded during our Peace and Justice Summit in Montgomery, Alabama, on April 26.
- The Worst of the Worst (streaming, Yale Visual Law Project) The Worst of the Worst: Portrait of a Supermax Prison depicts Connecticut’s sole supermax prison, where many inmates are held in solitary confinement for months and even years at a time. Hard-hitting interviews with a range of experts and administrators are interwoven with the powerful stories of those who spend their days within the walls of Northern: inmates and correctional officers.
- Mass Incarceration, Visualized (The Atlantic) In this animated interview, the sociologist Bruce Western explains the current inevitability of prison for certain demographics of young black men and how it's become a normal life event. "We've chosen the response of the deprivation of liberty for a historically aggrieved group, whose liberty in the United States was never firmly established to begin with," Western says.
