Making A Killing: Guns, Greed, and The NRA

Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, and The NRA tells the stories of how guns, and the billions made off of them, affect the lives of everyday Americans.

Brave New Films: Racial Justice Series

These films explore racism in policing, the media, and day-to-day circumstances. 

This is Crazy: Criminalizing Mental Health

America is “treating” mental illness through incarceration - and the price we are paying both in dollars and human capital is enormous. This is Crazy: Criminalizing Mental Health is our latest three-part series focusing on the problems with criminalizing mental health told through first-hand accounts. Part one shows what happens when police are not properly trained to deal with people with mental illness.

Guns in America

Koch Brothers Exposed: 2014 Edition

Koch Brothers Exposed: 2014 Edition

Koch Brothers Exposed is a hard-hitting investigation of the 1% at its very worst. This full-length documentary film on Charles and David Koch—two of the world’s richest and most powerful men -- is from acclaimed director Robert Greenwald. The billionaire brothers bankroll a vast network of organizations that work to undermine the interests of the 99% on issues ranging from Social Security to the environment to civil rights. This film uncovers the Kochs’ corruption—and points the way to how Americans can reclaim their democracy.

To Prison for Poverty

To Prison for Poverty

To Prison for Poverty documents the system that enables private probation companies to profit from charging excessive fees to low income people who can't pay small fines like traffic tickets. If they can't pay, they go to jail. 

Many people think that debtor’s prisons disappeared from American society just as surely as horse-based transportation. But in fact, people who are too poor to pay fines are still being threatened with incarceration -- and even imprisoned -- today. Add private, for-profit companies to the mix, and you've got a system that abuses those who can least afford it, with disastrous effects on poor people and communities of color .

Our new documentary, To Prison For Poverty, features two parts. Part 1 tells the story of Hali Wood, a seventeen-year-old from Columbiana, Alabama, deeply in debt to a private probation company, JCS.  Part 2 tells the story of Kathleen Hucks, a woman suing Sentinel Corrections Services for their abuse of power.

We see a similar dynamic with for-profit probation companies....

OverCriminalized • Alternatives to Incarceration

IS YOUR CITY OVERCRIMINALIZED?

OverCriminalized profiles three promising and less expensive interventions that may actually change the course of people’s lives. It’s time to roll back mass criminalization and focus on what works.

It seems that for almost every social problem that pops up, we turn to the criminal justice system. Suffering from mental illness? Here’s a cell. Struggling with drug dependency? Let’s throw you in handcuffs. Sleeping on the street? Here’s an arrest record. 

And if you are a person of color, the criminal justice crackdown can be even worse.

How could it possibly make sense to saddle police officers and prison wardens with sole responsibility for helping people get a roof over their head? Or to task lawyers and judges with treating mental illness or helping people get sober? Simply making problems into “crimes” is just making things worse.

We should do better. Not only is all of this inhumane, it’s expensive. When our tax dollars are picking up the tab, it makes sense to put funds where they will make the biggest impact. Housing programs help solve homelessness. Treatment helps stabilize mental illness and end drug dependency. Arrests and jail cells just waste time and money.

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