Join Hull-House and Jess Heaney from Critical Resistance for a screening and discussion of The Prison In Twelve Landscapes, a film about the prison and its life in the American landscape. Over two million people are in prison or in jail in the United States, displaced from their communities into a vast system which reorganizes society in complex ways.
RSVP for the screening and discussion here.
The Prison In Twelve Landscapes unfolds as a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA, from a California mountainside where female prisoners fight raging wildfires, to a Bronx warehouse full of goods destined for the state correctional system, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs. An award winning documentary film, The Prison in 12 Landscapes, provides an entry point into understanding the prison industrial complex. This program is presented in support of the exhibition, States of Incarceration, on view at Hull-House through August 10.
Jess Heaney is an organizer with Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to building a movement to abolish the prison industrial complex and end our reliance on imprisonment, policing and surveillance. With Critical Resistance, she has fought against the violence of policing through the successful Stop the Injunctions Coalition campaign, helped found an alternatives to policing initiative called The Oakland Power Projects, trained up health workers to be anti-policing advocates and educators, and is now campaigning to Stop Urban Shield, a SWAT training and militarized weapons expo. She has supported outreach and advocacy efforts to halt jail expansion in California, to end the use of solitary confinement in hand with the California Prisoner Hunger Strikes, and to maintain visiting hours for people in maximum security prisons in New York State.] She has been on staff as Development Director for since 2014, and a member since 2010.
Critical Resistance (CR) is a grassroots organization building a movement to end the reliance on the interlocking systems of imprisonment, surveillance, and policing—what we call the prison industrial complex (PIC)—as a response to political, social, and economic problems. Our approach combines organizing and advocacy to dismantle current structures of imprisonment and policing, changing how communities and decision-makers understand punishment and safety, and building new institutions and practices to transform and prevent interpersonal, communal, and social harm.
