Extraordinary Mental Health Project
If you spend any time working in the world of prison services, you learn how many people in jails and prisons are suffering from mental illness. It’s staggering. Still, numbers just don’t have the power of images, which is why multimedia projects — derided by some old-school journalists — can make the difference between extrapolating and emotion.
The project Trapped: Mental Illness in America’s Prisons is just devastating. I’m sure there will be hand-wringing over different aspects of the presentation (sensationalist? ethical?) but this is an important project. How else can we make the public aware of what this problem really means in felt terms? Of the despair and pain? Of how broken the system is?
There are many facets to the project. A print article, a short documentary, video interviews with prisoners, video interviews with inmate watchers, and still photos. It’s remarkable that one person did all of this, but I think this could be the future of journalism.
Big thanks to Alli Katz for sending me the link to this, which I now bequeath to you. Feeling depressed today? Don’t click. Go to cuteotters.com or something.
liz | 11:07 AM | Uncategorized
Horrible. While there is some reporting on the plight of persons dealing with mental illnesses in our jails and prisons little, if anything, is done to address longstanding issues. Absent action there is only lamentation.
It is disheartening that these conditions exist over 40 years after the release of “Titicut Follies” (A film about the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater – a prison hospital for the criminally insane.)
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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