A Radically Different Way to Look at Incarceration
The prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore once wrote, “Prison is not a building ‘over there,’ but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere.” This idea is the focus of the filmmaker Garrett Bradley’s Time, a gripping documentary that reframes the perception of mass incarceration and its far-reaching effects. Counter to the slew of prison films and television programming that have shaped the public imagination of life behind bars, Bradley shifts attention away from the geography of the prison as central to examining the carceral state and instead concentrates on the private sphere.
, which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, highlights a Louisiana couple, Rob and Sibil Fox Richardson, who were sentenced to prison for a bank robbery they committed in 1997, when they were 29 and 25, respectively. Rob was sentenced to 60 years, while Fox accepted a plea deal of 12 years and served three and a half.
