Survivors Guide To Prison

I took a lot out of this documentary in terms of seeing things from a different perspective. It's Heart breaking and horrifying and I do agree that there should be other, more civilized means of rehabilitating people, I also have to point out that there really are EVIL people out there. I'm not referring to the guys who killed someone in a moment of rage, I'm referring to serial rapists, serial murderers, serial child predators. These people cannot simply walk the streets and they certainly don't deserve any "sugar coated rehabilitation". These people are rotten and deserve as much pain and suffering as they inflicted upon their victims. I do not believe prisons should be done away with altogether but merely reserved for the true evil members of society. The difficulty comes in in drawing the distinction though. It's a complicated and very distorted mess.

The movie wasn't that bad but it wasn't a survivors guide to prison at all. I feel like someone about to go to prison somewhere is going to watch this and be like "thanks for the stats but I learned jack about how to survive in prison". I mean the documentary brings up some good points, if a bit one sided.

You might not feel the same way but I hate the fact that celebrities who never went to prison or knew anything about anything would comment throughout the film. Why are they here? They know nothing, they've never been to prison.

If you want some good points for your college paper it's good (trust me that's what I used this film for), if you want to survive prison find something else.

It's very dreamy without being realistic. It's just as much a political propaganda film as it is a informative documentary

I watched this movie expecting a gritty how-to for surviving in prison but the longer I watched the more it felt like an advertisement for a politician during reelection. Lots of percentages and statistics thrown at you with very little in regards to the sources of where they came from. It also felt very imbalanced in its portrayal of prison and prisoners, on one side talking about how terrible prisoners are but then talking the next about how they all shouldn't be there. They didn't seem to be very clear to what exactly they were trying to say. One woman in particular struck me as being in complete denial that murder is bad. I would have liked to see both sides of this issue not just the one that they seem to want to shove down your throat.

.. and yet you have quite a few similarities between them. Starting point is, that the prison system is ... well broken to say the least. Privatising certain "businesses" can be a good thing. And I reckon it may take something away from the goverment. Like a weight they don't have to lift themselves. But that also opens up a big can of problems.

And many of them get shined upon here. Now this casts a wider net that another documentary I watched, which was about injustice against black people. This puts the justice system overall on trial. So that's quite a big undertaking. It works quite nicely, especially with narrating by Susan Sarandon and many contributions by people like Ice-T, Danny Trejo and Police employes who try to do the right thing (and get somewhat blocked by a justice machinery that needs reform as soon as possible) ...