Prisoners in Louisiana

Prisoners in Louisiana

In The Farm: Angola, USA, documentary filmmakers Jonathan Stack and Liz Garbus follow the lives of six prisoners in a maximum-security state penitentiary in Louisiana. Known as 'The Farm' because the prison's fertile lands produce crops which the prisoners harvest, Angola is also a former plantation where slaves once worked its 18,000 acres-slaves from Angola, Africa. Eighty percent of the prison's 5,000 males are black, so it's hard to escape the irony of The Farm's 200-year history. Alternating between interviews of the prisoners, footage of the duties they perform, and interviews with the warden, Burl Cain, The Farm isn't immediately arresting. In fact, there's a banality to the filmmakers' approach-they portray the prison as a town not very different from other farming communities. The terrible realities of incarceration-harsh sentences, abandonment by loved ones, and long-overdue pardons-seem to accumulate as the film unfolds, and they stay with you long after you've left the theatre (www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFqVIlL0A2A).

The filmmakers obviously set out to prove the existence of racism and other forms of prejudice in the judicial system that placed these men in Angola, and that continues to discriminate against them in parole hearings and appeals. However, a prejudicial justice system isn't news, and neither is portraying institutions as evil. Taking the rather difficult position of pleading for mercy, the filmmakers rely on the six men to discuss little-known and rarely discussed facts of incarceration that, despite these men's violent crimes, lead you to wonder about the motives of their accusers. If revenge is the sole reason for incarceration, how can we consider ourselves members of a progressive society?

In one startling scene, we see Vincent Simmons' parole-board hearing. Simmons was accused of raping two women, but he says he didn't commit the crimes. First, the board interviews one of the women; ...