About Broken On All Sides Documentary

Broken On All Sides Documentary

Synopsis

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.

Interviews

• Khalid Abdul Rasheed and Theresa Shoatz, activists with the Human Rights Coalition (Philadelphia)
• Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow," Associate Professor of Law at Mortiz College of Law, and Senior Fellow at Kirwin Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
• Jonathan Feinberg, partner with Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg
• John Goldkamp, Chair of the Temple University Criminal Justice Department
• Nathaniel Gravely Hayes, construction worker, formerly incarcerated in the Philadelphia Prison System (PPS)
• Angus Love, board member of PA Prison Society
• Marlene Martin, National Director of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty
• Tom Namako, journalist who toured PPS and wrote City Paper articles on overcrowding
• John Street, former mayor of Philadelphia
• Judge Sheila Woods-Skipper, Supervising Judge at the PA Court of Common Pleas Criminal Division
• Su Ming Yeh, attorney with PA Institutional Law Project
• Carlton Young, former correctional officer in PPS

Drawings

by Leonard C. Jefferson (a prisoner at SCI Albion, Pennsylvania)

Music

• John Coursey
• Brendan Dougherty
• Shaun Ellis
• Jesse Olsen Bay & David Wilson (a poet incarcerated in California)
• Alexander Vittum
• Sunday Labor
• Tide Tables
• Tha Truth
• Matthew Pillischer

Person of Interest Day 2

Matthew Pil­lis­cher grad­u­ated in 2000 from Ben­ning­ton Col­lege with a degree in film­mak­ing. In 2010 he grad­u­ated from Tem­ple Uni­ver­sity Beasley School of Law and is now a licensed attor­ney in PA and NJ. Matt worked as a staff attorney at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, helping people with problems due to their criminal records. In the 10 years between col­lege and law school, Matt worked in var­i­ous jobs as a restau­rant and retail worker, a farm­hand, and a social worker. An artist at heart, Matt always cre­ated movies, plays, paint­ings, music, and other art on the side. Dur­ingthe lead-up to the 2003 inva­sion of Iraq and wit­ness­ing the poverty, police bru­tal­ity, and racism liv­ing in Cincin­nati, OH, Matt became deeply politi­cized by the events going on around him. He became an activist and worked with var­i­ous groups and indi­vid­u­als against racism and poverty, for work­ers' rights, women's and LGBT rights, and against mil­i­tary conquest.

Matt entered law school with an eye towards under­stand­ing the legal sys­tems that per­pet­u­ate the unjust sta­tus quo, and also hoped to use law as a way to help lib­er­ate poor and work­ing peo­ple. Matt con­tin­ued mak­ing music and movies through­out law school, par­tic­i­pated in activism in Philly and beyond, and dur­ing his last year of law school he began work on a movie about the Philadel­phia Prisons.

Through an intern­ship with the civil rights firm, Kairys, Rudovsky, Mess­ing & Fein­berg, Matt worked on a law­suit against the Philadel­phia Prison Sys­tem for over­crowd­ing con­di­tions. He inter­viewed inmates and inves­ti­gated some of the con­di­tions in the pris­ons. The sum­mer before, he had worked with PA Insti­tu­tional Law Project, a non-profit that serves the insti­tu­tion­al­ized pop­u­la­tions in PA, advo­cat­ing for pris­on­ers' rights. These expe­ri­ences, along with his­tory and polit­i­cal the­ory he had learned as an activist, focused his life's work on prob­lems within the prison and crim­i­nal jus­tice systems.

Matt was lucky enough to meet other stu­dents at Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia Law School who were inter­ested in the issue and col­lab­o­rated on the movie at var­i­ous stages. What started as a 15 minute video on local over­crowd­ing issues has become a fea­ture doc­u­men­tary that takes on the entire crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. It would not have been pos­si­ble with­out all the won­der­ful peo­ple who helped along the way, par­tic­u­larly co-producers, Neal Swisher, Agatha Koprowski, and Karly O'Krent, and the movie's interviewees.