Prison Through Tomorrow's Eyes

Having been in and out of prison a thousand times (literally), today, I find myself making documentaries to expose the realities of prison and working steadfastly to reform them. But that was never the plan. It has been a peculiar, and unlikely, journey--from researcher to professor of criminal justice to filmmaker.

My first prison was Attica. I was a special investigator for the McKay Commission appointed to investigate the 1971 Attica Riot. Then a graduate student in criminal justice at the SUNY-Albany, I discovered that many--perhaps most--inmates are not so different from the rest of us. It was then that I also discovered the power of film as both a story-telling and social-action medium. The written Attica Report won the eye of a few thousand. But films about that ill-fated prison moved millions. 


Back then, prisons were an idle curiosity for me. People locked up for years in cages? Not good, but not my bag. A lot more money to be made in law than in documentary filmmaking. And the idea of producing images more sophisticated than those of a Kodac Instamatic? Pure fantasy.

I became the first federal prison intern, in 1973, in Petersburg, Virginia (again, mostly out of curiosity). What I saw there shaped my views about incarceration and fueled my curiosity about the men and women behind bars. Those years also gave us the iconic prison heroes of "Cool Hand Luke," "Papillon," and "Brubaker" (whose real-life namesake I would later befriend). I was gripped by the inhumanity of prison and the its anthropomorphic tendency to destroy. Wilde had it right: "it is only what is good in man that wastes and withers there." 


Ph.D. in hand, a rookie Assistant Professor at UNM, I took my criminology class to the Penitentiary of New Mexico. Shortly thereafter, I partnered with an English professor and an independent filmmaker to produce the Emmy-winning "Doing Time" in 1980--one of the first real prison documentaries. Fatefully, just two months after that program premiered on PBS, that very prison--the site of our documentary--erupted in the bloodiest prison riot in American history. Ten years later, two of us returned to reprise the story in another documentary--Doing Time: Ten Years Later.


In the interim, I had joined the faculty at SDSU, where my students beseeched me to "take them to prison." That began the now nationally famous SDSU "PrisonTour"--a five-day, mind-bending adventure for 24 students into the bowels of California's prison system. Now, 30 years later, I have escorted more than 2,000 students on precisely 100 of these tours. They see the good, the bad, and the ugly of it all, in one of the most intense experiences of their lives: they go face-to-face with murderers, rapists, and drug addicts, and they talk to guards and wardens, about their world behind the walls. 
Recently, I was granted unprecedented access to have a documentary film crew chronicle these students’ life-changing adventure. It is the subject of my most recent, documentary, Prison Through Tomorrow's Eyes.