The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
A meditation on the prison’s disappearance in the era of mass incarceration, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes unfolds as a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives.
More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet prisons have never felt further away or more out of sight. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes excavates the hidden geographies of the modern prison system by offering a film about the prison in which we never see an actual penitentiary. Instead, it journeys through a series of seemingly ordinary landscapes across America, for a series of surprising discoveries: a California mountainside where female prisoners fight raging wildfires; a warehouse full of boxer shorts and specially sanction cassette tapes; a park with ex-incarcerated chess players; an abandoned coalfield; and a host of other unexpected spaces.