Preview: ‘The Prison Within,’ A Documentary Exploring Restorative Justice

The notion that the prison system is broken is nothing new. What’s far more interesting is how to fix it—which is the focus of a new documentary being released by Gravitas Ventures next week.

In The Prison Within, director Katherin Hervey, a former Los Angeles public defender and volunteer prison college instructor, takes viewers inside a unique program at San Quentin Prison focused on restorative justice and transforming the prison system.

During meetings of the San Quentin Victim Offender Education Group (VOEG), prisoners and survivors come together in a restorative justice program that encourages prisoners to see how the trauma they’ve experienced contributed to their criminality and understand the impact of their crimes on victims.

The sessions Hervey chooses to show are sobering. One man describes how, when he was a young boy, his father lashed a rope around the child’s waist and tossed him into a river. The dad said the rope wasn’t to keep the boy safe—it was to pull up his body when he drowned.

Another man describes how he accidentally shot and killed a woman, and his reaction when that woman’s mother spoke to him.

Survivors discuss brutal attacks and how, though they often hungered for “justice,” they didn’t heal as they thought they would when their attackers were punished.

“I wanted to make a film that started to break down divisions, a really intimate film that takes viewers into the hearts and minds of the people in the film to show that, but for a set of circumstances, that could have been me,” Hervey says. “I want people to sit in their shoes, go see someone else in the film who’s nothing like you, but when you hear their story, you think, ‘Oh, I get it.’”

Hervey believes that if things are going to change, “we have to unpack it. It’s super painful to examine so much of our history, of the disenfranchisement based on race and class and capitalism, and the people in the film are doing that in their own way.”

One of those profiled in the film is Troy Williams, who served time at the prison and later became a Soros Justice Fellow. He believes storytelling is the best way to capture people’s attention and make them care about what happens behind bars. Storytelling gives viewers a stake in the story. And they watch prisoners change.

“What I love about this film and love about what began at San Quentin is that when people started to reach out for help and assistance, it started to heal people. They take their own lives into their own hands and see themselves as part of a community,” Williams says.

He says he witnessed the program actually stopped crimes from happening. Prisoners take the lessons in the session to heart and share them with others.

Williams remembers seeing people in the program on a collect call to someone at home, telling the person on the other end of the line not to do something—“because you don’t want to end up here, that’s why.”

Restorative justice means recognizing the importance of another chance. Someone who committed a crime 20 or 30 years ago can become an asset to the community, Williams notes. The film compellingly argues that teaching about and confronting trauma is a way to break the cycle of incarceration that too often takes hold. And seeing survivors reckon with that, too, presents both sides of the powerful argument.

The Prison Within, which is narrated by Hill Harper, is competing in the American Black Film Festival (ABFF), which takes place through Aug. 31. The film will be released on VOD, digital and Blu-Ray/DVD platforms on Tuesday.