Name: Doing Time: Life Inside the Big House
Genre: Documentary
Released: 1991-02-12
Duration: 1 h
Rating: 7.1
Cast: Alan Raymond

Alan and Susan Raymond's Academy Award-nominated "Doing Time: Life Inside the Big House" focuses on the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. It features interviews with the inmates, the guards, and even the warden. It looks like one tough existence in there, and the prisoners will probably have a hard time reintegrating into society once they get out.

The documentary mentions that the US leads the world in incarceration. At the time, the prison population was 1.5 million; now it's over 2 million, most of them black and Latino. The documentary also mentions the sentencing reform that caused the prison population to swell. I suspect that the things experienced by the inmates in Lewisburg - including the plumbing issue - happen in prisons all over the US.

The basic point of the documentary is that these men are human beings, and their mistakes sent them to this hellhole. Indeed, it's the so-called War on Drugs* has disproportionately targeted non-white people and devastated entire communities. As long as we have these regressive laws, the prisons will almost certainly remain filled.

*One of Nixon's cabinet members later admitted that the purpose of the War on Drugs was to destroy both the anti-war movement and the Black Power movement.

The documentary is a form of non-fiction storytelling that aims to present factual information, insights, and perspectives on real-world subjects, events, issues, or people. Documentaries can cover a wide range of topics, including history, science, culture, social issues, nature, biographies, and more.

Dziga Vertov in Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

America Undercover offers an inside look at the maximum-security federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. It examines the difficulties of life in the prison and talks to prisoners who are sentenced to spend the rest of their lives there.

Doing Time: Life Inside the Big House (1991)

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Doing Time: Life Inside the Big House

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