The Corrections Documentary Project / Ashley Hunt

The Corrections Documentary Project began simply as a single documentary, CORRECTIONS: a 56 minute feature documentary that uses "prison privatization" as a lens onto a larger set of cultural processes, centered around a prison system growing for reasons other than mere "justice." While privatization was clearly an issue that needed to be debated publicly, it also opened up room for needed conversations about crime and punishment, about what is "natural" and what is built upon politics of race and class, disguised as something else.

As CORRECTIONS proved a useful tool for grassroots and activist groups, new opportunities arose to make further pieces focused on specific campaigns and circumstances. This led to the production of "footnotes" to CORRECTIONS, pieces which are each in a way a "footnote" to the larger, original piece.

The project is continuing to grow with footnotes and other related projects, continuing to investigate the relationship of mass incarceration in the U.S. and abroad to broader changes society is facing: from the lingering challenges of race, class, gender and sexual based discrimination, to larger philosophical questions as to the value of "the prison" as an institution.

Million Dollar Blocks / Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL)

New York City and Wichita, KS, are among the many cities in the United States in which the state regularly spends more than one million dollars to incarcerate prisoners who live within a single census block. Advocacy organizations, city planners, and community groups working with released prisoners are asking: where are these "million dollar blocks," and what's happening there? The Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) at Columbia is working with the Justice Mapping Center to produce a range of maps of this phenomenon.

This unique partnership enables the Justice Mapping Center to refine analytical and graphical techniques within the research environment of the Spatial Information Design Lab, which can then be applied to real life policy initiatives through work with the JFA Institute. Reciprocally, input from state and local leaders is then brought back to the Design Lab for further development. This feedback loop is a valuable tool resulting in new methods of spatial analyses and ways of visually presenting them that reveal previously unseen dimensions of criminal justice and related government policies in states across the United States.

Up the Ridge / Holler to the Hood and Appalshop

Up the Ridge offers viewers an in-depth look at the United States prison industry and the social impact of moving hundreds of thousands of inner-city minority offenders to distant rural outposts. Up the Ridge explores competing political agendas that align government policy with human rights violations, and political expediencies that bring communities into racial and cultural conflict with tragic consequences.