‘We are not monsters’: Women in Illinois prisons who allege they were victims of domestic violence see their struggle in film

CHICAGO — Inside a rec room at the Logan Correctional Center in downstate Illinois, a projector screen leaned slightly forward but was upright enough as an audience gathered in front of it to watch a film.

A large speaker on the floor would provide sufficient if not perfect sound. And as the sun set, staff quickly created makeshift curtains to darken the room.

Given the limitations of a prison, the showing of “And So I Stayed,” was, as the filmmaker would say later, not the best technical presentation.

But it was by far the most meaningful.

The film — which documents efforts to pass a law in New York that allows survivors of gender-based violence to present the abuse they suffered as consideration for new, shorter sentences — was being shown for the first time to an audience inside a correctional facility, and specifically to people who had been convicted of serious crimes they argue were related to abuse.

As the group, mostly women, watched the film’sstories of three survivors, including the abuse and torture they suffered, the anguished 911 calls they made to report their crimes and the strained phone conversations with their children from prison, those at Logan nodded in agreement and shook their heads in frustration. They wept openly but silently, passing tissues to each other. They reached for support, holding hands or touching each