Activist and filmmaker Matthew Cooke directs an anti-prison film under the rubric of a prison and justice system guidebook in the arresting documentary "Survivor's Guide to Prison." Actor, producer and former inmate Danny Trejo serves as a guide, along with Cooke, who offers his own direct commentary, fleshing out details and facts. A cavalcade of celebs join Trejo and Cooke, including Danny Glover, Ice-T, Tom Morello, Busta Rhymes, Questlove, Brandon Boyd, B-Real and others, who voice statistics and offer commentary. Susan Sarandon provides voice-over in this stylish and forthright film about the broken U.S. criminal justice system.
The tips and tricks of the "Survivor's Guide To Prison" include lessons about making it through police interrogations (get a lawyer) and surviving county jail (just get out of it as soon as possible, post bail by any means necessary). There are subheadings such as "Join a Gang," and "Make Weapons." These lessons are illustrated with anecdotes and experiences from the harrowing life stories of Bruce Lisker and Reggie Cole, two innocent men imprisoned for decades for murders they didn't commit. They survived solitary confinement, prison stabbings, jailhouse informants and being railroaded into plea deals, and lived to tell the tale.
Cooke liberally employs footage of police brutality and prison abuse that is difficult to watch, including abuse, beatings and torture of prisoners both mentally ill and not. The film details the racial bias in prison stats, goes into the social injustice that prisoners face, the economic realities of prison labor that pervade the mainstream industry and the equating of prison labor to modern legal slave labor. Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow," offers her expert testimony about the ways in which the private prison industrial complex strips rights from marginalized people, and other scholars, experts, law enforcement officers and activists offer commentary as well.
Cooke hits his points hard, fast, and quickly. There is a lot of information to synthesize, which Cooke humanizes with personal stories. Lisker and Cole are the throughlines, along with other former inmates, as well as the story of Susan Mellon, a woman who was also wrongfully imprisoned, and is bonded to Cole as a fellow victim of an inept LAPD detective who investigated her case.
Cooke wants to demonstrate how this can happen to anyone, and the lessons are carefully chosen and worded to show how corrupt and difficult to navigate the criminal justice system is. Ultimately, the film seeks to humanize prisoners, to rehabilitate the idea of prisoners as people, though they have been dehumanized through this punitive system and harsh media representations.
"Survivor's Guide to Prison" offers real solutions, including ending the war on drugs, ending for-profit prisons and increased citizen oversight, as well as instituting restorative justice programs, as well as better mental health and drug rehabilitation. It ends in a very spiritual and metaphysical place, with Deepak Chopra describing forgiveness as divine consciousness. That forgiveness is the only way out of this system that individuals currently have in their power _ achieving personal freedom from within.
