He was a convicted murderer. She was a prison volunteer. They fell in love. Frontline follows the story of Ron Cooney, who tries to work his way through the prison system to parole from a life sentence, and Lesley Earl, the woman who wants to help him go straight.

An ex mobster reflects on love and loss after spending 32 years in prison.
2024

Emperors of Nothing is an unprecedented immersion within Forest, a prison in Brussels notorious for its inhumane incarceration conditions, bearing witness to how the human spirit resists or submits to this harsh world. Deeply personal and candid moments shared with inmates and wardens alike, those who have forfeited or devoted their lives to prison, expose universal truths of what it means to be "behind bars".
2024

A young man, convicted murderer, has a chance of redemption when he enters the best Italian university of economics, going back and forth from prison to university every day.
2023

An organic farmer in Maine sets out to transform the prison food system. Seeds of Change captures the intersecting stories of life-long farmer Mark McBrine and several incarcerated men as they harvest their own meals from a five-acre prison garden unlike any other.
2023

Narrated by Uncle Jack Charles and seen through the eyes of Indigenous prisoners at Victoria’s Fulham Correctional Centre, this documentary explores how art and culture can empower Australia's First Nations people to transcend their unjust cycles of imprisonment.
2021

2019

In 2011, Maine State Prison launched a pioneering reform program to scale back its use of solitary confinement. Bafta and Emmy-winning film-maker Dan Edge and his co-director Lauren Mucciolo were given unprecedented access to the solitary unit - and filmed there for more than three years. The result is an extraordinary and harrowing portrait of life in solitary - and a unique document of a radical and risky experiment to reform a prison. The US is the world leader in solitary confinement. More than 80,000 American prisoners live in isolation, some have been there for years, even decades. Solitary is proven to cause mental illness, it is expensive, and it is condemned by many as torture. And yet for decades, it has been one of the central planks of the American criminal justice system.
2017

Set entirely inside Folsom Prison, The Work follows three men during four days of intensive group therapy with convicts, revealing an intimate and powerful portrait of authentic human transformation that transcends what we think of as rehabilitation.
2017

Insein Rhythm portrays the sights, sounds and rhythms of Yangon’s Insein train station which is also a stone’s throw away from the country’s infamous Insein prison.
2016

The documentary chronicles the 139 years of the ex penitentiary García Moreno in Quito, Ecuador, and traces left by the inmates to be transferred to the new prison in the province of Cotopaxi.
2015

Documentary on Sakine Cansız (Sara), the Kurdish revolutionary and PKK co-founder killed in Paris in January 2013 by Turkish agents.
2015
2013

A surreal look at the day-to-day life of American soldiers stationed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba through the eyes of a traveling circus troupe cleared to perform there.
2013

Documentary about four maffia-like friends based in Amsterdam.
2010

Five transgender women share their prison experiences. Interviews with attorneys, doctors, and other experts are also included.
2006

A look beyond the shock and inhumanity of prison rape to the intricate social hierarchy that keeps it alive. A filmmaker goes deep inside Alabama's infamous Limestone penitentiary to uncover the long-term causes and consequences of prison rape. With a startling lack of inhibition, five inmates reveal the workings of an elaborate inner society.
2004

This documentary, which features Sergei Parajanov’s heartbreaking letters from prison, explores creativity among inmates and the art born in conditions designed to destroy all traces of selfhood.
1998

The Big One is an investigative documentary from director Michael Moore who goes around the country asking why big American corporations produce their product abroad where labor is cheaper while so many Americans are unemployed, losing their jobs, and would happily be hired by such companies as Nike.
1997
1997

From its beginning during the Reagan years through current times, the War on Drugs has left many victims stranded in the prison system. PRISONERS OF THE WAR ON DRUGS reveals life behind bars in the nation’s prisons. Each prisoner has his or her own story, but for most, the story is predictably similar; they have been criminalized for drugs or drug related offenses, locked up with easy access to substances, and given little opportunity for rehabilitation. This film provides an inside look at the prison system, its prisoners and a war on drugs we do not seem to be winning.
1996