Slought is pleased to announce The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, a film program about the hidden geographies of the contemporary prison-industrial complex, on Tuesday, December 12, 2017 from 6:30-8:30pm in the Mediatheque. The program, organized with students in the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania and co-presented with the Reentry Think Tank, will begin with a screening of the film, followed by a discussion with director Brett Story, Reentry Think Tank fellow Jym Baker, and Toorjo (TJ) Ghose, a scholar of mass incarceration and social work.

In the United States there are more than two million people in prison, up from only 300,000 forty years ago. Yet prisons have never felt more far away or more out of sight. Prisons exist primarily out of sight: not only are they frequently constructed away from population centers, but journalists, filmmakers and researchers are increasingly denied access to the world inside their walls. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes harnesses the power of cinema in order to highlight the invisible presence of the prison. The film pinpoints moments, spaces, and individuals which reveal how deeply the prison industrial complex is braided into the relationships, economies and landscapes all around us.

From a California mountainside where female prisoners fight the region's raging wildfires, to a congregation of formerly incarcerated chess players in Manhattan who spent their time behind bars mastering the game, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs — the film stages scenes where prisons do work and affect lives. Moreover, it poses new questions about the necessity and desirability of that work. When we start to examine the prison system through spaces that are not prisons, we begin to see how much more entangled it is with jobs, with resource extraction, with economic development, with race and with poverty than it is with crime.