Film Screening and Community Discussion
Broken on All Sides: Race, Mass Incarceration & New Visions for Criminal Justice in the U.S.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
1:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Riverside Church
enter at 91 Claremont Avenue (between West 120th & 121st Streets, NY, NY)
Panel discussion with the film’s director, activist and attorney, Matt Pillischer; L.Amir Amma, a student and activist who was formerly incarcerated; Soffiyah Elijah, Executive Director of the Correctional Association; Women On The Rise Telling HerStory (WORTH);and others working with the Campaign to End the New Jim Crow.
THE EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
http://brokenonallsidesnyc.eventbrite.com
About the film:
http://brokenonallsides.com/
The project began as a way to explore, educate about, and advocate change around the overcrowding of the Philadelphia county jail system. The documentary has come to focus on mass incarceration across the nation and the intersection of race and poverty within criminal justice. The feature-length documentary is available for activists and educators to use in order to raise consciousness and organize for change. Since its completion in February 2012 the director, Matthew Pillischer, has been doing a grassroots tour of the movie: setting up meetings in cities across the country, where a screening of the movie can kick off discussions by people who were formerly incarcerated and their families and allies on how we can dismantle the system of mass incarceration. If your school, workplace, organization, or religious institution can host a screening, please contact the director.
The documentary centers around the theory put forward by many, and most recently by Michelle Alexander (who appears in the movie), that mass incarceration has become “The New Jim Crow.” That is, since the rise of the drug war and the explosion of the prison population, and because discretion within the system allows for arrest and prosecution of people of color at alarmingly higher rates than whites, prisons and criminal penalties have become a new version of Jim Crow. Much of the discrimination that was legal in the Jim Crow era is today illegal when applied to black people but perfectly legal when applied to “criminals.” The problem is that through subjective choices, people of color have been targeted at significantly higher rates for stops, searches, arrests, prosecution, and harsher sentences. So, where does this leave criminal justice?
Through interviews with people on many sides of the criminal justice system, this documentary aims to answer questions and provoke questions on an issue walled-off from the public’s scrutiny.
