- In this deeply personal film, director Roger Ross Williams sets out on a journey to understand the complex forces of racism and greed currently at work in America's prison system.
- For director Roger Ross Williams, prison was not a distant possibility when he was growing up, but a daily threat. "As a young Black man in a chaotic environment, I always felt there was a chance that, whether or not I committed a crime, I could end up behind bars." Roger life took a different path, though, when as a teenager he left his hometown of Easton, Pennsylvania to pursue his dreams of being a filmmaker. Overcoming all odds, he became the first black director to win an Academy Award. As his success grew, he thought about Easton less and less, until the day he heard that his childhood friend, Tommy Alvin, had committed suicide.
Now, after thirty years, Roger returns home to pay his respects and reconnect with childhood friends. He's shocked and distressed to learn that virtually all of the men in the Alvin family have been, or are currently, in prison. Haunted by how easily this could have happened to himself, Roger embarks on a deeply personal journey into the heart of the American prison system. He starts in his own hometown, but soon finds himself navigating a Byzantine maze of powerful institutions: police precincts, courtrooms, local jails, maximum security prisons, and corporate empires. As he explores a massive and dysfunctional system, he encounters complicit politicians and prison profiteers, each with their own self-serving motivations to maintain the status quo, as well as prison administrators who recognize that most of their inmates should be free, yet are helpless to release them.
He seeks counsel and knowledge from frustrated community leaders and activists, including tireless Adam Foss. His ambitious mission is to personally reeducate America's 31,000 prosecutors to "cut off the supply" of people flowing into the system, and also try and save lives in his own neighborhood, one young man at a time. We follow Adam as he attempts to change the system on both a macro and micro level.
Roger comes face to face with the endless hoard of Americans trapped behind the walls of the prison industrial complex, and the families struggling to survive on the outside. Roger searches for solutions within the tangled web of political, social, and economic forces that drive the biased system, which has ensnared so many of his friends.
A deeply moving and cinematic experience, the film is a reckoning with America's conscience, and a stunning accusation. Not just of power and greed, but of silence - the stain of comfort, willful ignorance of real costs. Roger's pursuit for an answer propels the film to examine all strata of our society. From the free-market ideals that America is founded upon, to the savage ways in which our country has manifested those ideals. There is no single villain to blame, and no obvious solution. Real change requires a sea of change across a spectrum of industries. Not just the reining in of corporate influence, but reform in political, financial, legal, educational, and mental health care spheres as well. In AMERICAN JAIL, Roger returns home to take a long hard look at the human toll of the prison system.
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