For the first time in history, more citizens are locked up than any other country on earth. A record-setting 2.2 Million American inmates equals violence, overcrowding, drugs, mental illness, predation, gang wars and riots.
EPA/Ulises Rodriguez
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We have created virtually an entire nation of inmates. Inside the miles of razor wire fence, concrete walls and ultra-security steel doors, our Prison Nation is facing a crisis, besieged with violence, overcrowding, drugs, mental illness, predation, gang wars and bloody riots.
National Geographic Channel's (NGC) Prison Nation — premieres on Sunday, November 25, at 8 p.m. ET/PT — and travels the country to take viewers inside the closed world of high and maximum-security prisons that are increasingly plagued with problems.
With special access granted to NGC crews, candid accounts are journaled from within the cell blocks including seasoned criminals running gambling and drug rackets, first timers learning the covert rules and women who prove they can be every bit as brutal as men.
The documentary shows the struggle to maintain control amid virtually inevitable violence, and learn how prisoners work to beat the system through shrewd innovation, time and time again.
Once on the outside, with no money, housing or job plan and new connections to other criminals, most prisoners end up committing crimes and returning right back behind bars.
The show asks if prisons really making us safer, or if they are just churning out more turmoil.
"Of the 95 percent of individuals who will leave our prison system," says Jeanne Woodford, former director of the California Dept. of Corrections, "very few are prepared to return to society in a meaningful way ... so it's really a formula for disaster."
Some of the facts and figures revealed in the special include the following:
- America's population behind bars has increased 1,000 percent in the last 30 years.
"Prison Nation" ventures into one overcrowded prison's gym that has been turned into a makeshift dorm: 120 inmates jammed on top of one another in bunk beds three high.
Overcrowding has exacerbated ethnic divisions among latinos, whites and blacks into sometimes violent racial conflict.
The show also illustrates the elaborate structures of gangs as a criminal enterprise, discusses rape as a fact of life and details how prisons have become de facto asylums for the mentally ill.
Viewers will hear from a variety of experts, such as criminologist Dr. Joan Petersilia (University of California) and prison psychiatrist Dr. James Gilligan (New York University), as well as former and current rehabilitation and corrections staff who discuss the troubles abounding due to get-tough legislation and mandatory sentencing.
But these experts also offer solutions for releasing offenders into society to lead a crime-free, productive life ... versus a life doomed to returning to Prison Nation.
Featured prisons include the following: Salinas Valley State Prison (Soledad, Calif.), one of California's most dangerous prisons on one of the state's most violent yards; Ironwood State Prison (Blythe, Calif.); Pelican Bay State Prison (Crescent City, Calif.), a notorious prison holding some of the most violent and hard-to-handle gang members in California; Oak Park Heights Facility (Stillwater, Minn.), a fortress-like compound with more than 500 cameras; Lebanon Correctional Institute (Lebanon, Ohio); and Utah State Prison (Draper, Utah).
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