Control: The Rise of Extreme Incarceration is a feature-length documentary that traces the largest expansion of punitive power in the United States. The movie focuses on three conditions that push our penal system to the brink: the implementation of long-term solitary confinement, the criminalization of mental illness, and the incarceration of juveniles. Over the last 40 years, our system of incarceration has metastasized into virtually every aspect of our culture and has permeated our entire social structure. Political activists face a two-tiered system that openly punishes them for their political beliefs. The mentally ill are bounced back and forth between a “public” space that has little tolerance for aberrant behavior and a prison that offers little hope in the way of psychiatric treatment. Children are forced to attend school alongside armed police officers, as they watch their friends, family, and themselves, get caught in the sticky web of law enforcement. Today, our complex penal system has swallowed up 7 million American citizens and its long shadow is cast over millions more; American society relies more heavily on imprisonment and punishment than any other on record.
Penetrating the regime of silence of this entrenched system, Control acknowledges the trauma generated by incarceration through interwoven portraits of three key characters and their friends, families, and advocates. Ojore Lutalo, a former member of the Black Liberation Army and an identified anarchist, was released from Trenton Prison last year after spending nearly 30 years in solitary confinement. Luther is a 16-year-old living in the Bronx who was arrested this past spring for the first time. In November, he goes to trial on a case that could possibly put him behind bars for years. Leah, the godmother of a bipolar man in solitary confinement, was driven to become an outspoken activist for the rights of those incarcerated with psychiatric disabilities.
Control traces these stories out in order to help incite a cultural shift in the way we think, see, and ultimately, tolerate the trauma generated by our system of mass incarceration.
Rights for Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities (RIPPD) is an activist group in New York City that is working to end the practice of incarcerating people with mental illness. This video documents RIPPD’s campaign to bring Community Crisis Intervention Teams to the NYPD. After police in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, killed Iman Morales by taser, RIPPD wants [...]
Radio Silence is the latest installation piece by digital media artist Zach Poff, and it was on display at Devotion Gallery in Brooklyn, New York from July 2 to July 11. Sponsored by free103point9, the piece is concerned with the natural and unnatural pauses in speech that occur during radio broadcasts, and these sites for [...]
Activists and organizations working in and around prisons gathered at the 2nd US Social Forum in Detroit to share knowledge and make connections across what proved to be a diverse and vibrant landscape of practices. Over 50 panels were convened, involving hundreds of individuals representing communities from all over the country. Addressing the crisis happening [...]
Situated in the thriving neighborhood of Fairmount in Philadelphia lies a decaying ruin: Eastern State Penitentiary. Back when this iconic prison admitted its first inmate in October of 1829, the then-magnificent building was up on a hill far from where most Philadelphians lived, and it was a site to be feared. Behind its massive stone [...]
Listen to This: Crown Heights Oral History Project is an audio archive that attempts to supplement the official history of this dynamic community in central Brooklyn, bringing together the personal histories and memories of longtime residents of a storied neighborhood. Program director Alex Kelly brought together five students from Paul Robeson High School to invite [...]
As the pace of life quickens, the number of applications for ten-day silent meditation retreats has gone through the roof. A story by Greg Emerson Bocquet. No talking. No reading. No writing or listening to music, or checking voice mail. For practitioners of Vipassana meditation, who follow these rules for ten, 20, even 60 days [...]
Ours is a grimy bit of blue; And very small; And sunbeams scarce adventure to O’ertop the wall. A bird that flutters swiftly by; A wind that passes with a sigh; A cloudlet sailing slow and high; And that is all. O matins, and O vesper bells, Toll slowly! A city of a thousand cells— [...]
“As we all know, absolute silence is impossible—it’s the ending of all vibrations, total death,” states George Prochnik, the author of the new In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (Doubleday, 2010). Our sonic landscape is a mixture of signal and noise, silence and form, and Prochnik’s pursuit is to [...]
It is a recovering of sonic phenomena that would otherwise be lost. We traveled from Boston to the small town of Kittery, Maine with Ernst Karel and Jed Speare to do some field recordings before a live performance they were to give later that evening at the Buoy Gallery. They are members of the New [...]
Pursuit of Silence: An in depth interview with author George Prochnik about his new book that examines the valuable role silence plays in our lives.
NEPU Mic'd: Visit with members of the New England Phonographer's Union during a recording session and performance.
Silent Worship: The Brooklyn Friends Meeting house is a gathering place where Quakers meet to worship in silence.
Silence=Death: Avram Finkelstein, a member of the Silence=Death Project, talks about AIDS, ACT-UP, institutional silence, Holocaust imagery, street art, and the making of an iconic political image.
