Survivors Guide To Prison

I wish the documentary would have expanded more on the following :

Most people serving time.. Put themselves in situations to go there or associate with those who help them to get there ..

There are a million others things in life to do than sitting behind bars .

If you do become incarcerated in the US ... You have free and better access to healthcare, dental care, mental healthcare ,legal aid and free educational opportunities more than the average working American on the outside.

If you find yourself incarcerated , take full advantage of all of the above mentioned benefits while you, particularly health and educational .

A lot of people go to prison and prefer go BACK to prison because they actually make more money being incarcerated then being on the outside

People tend to get more charges inside than what they originally went in for in the first place .

Youth prisons tend to be worse than adult prisons..much worse !

If you are not educated on the above mentioned when you go in , you will have a Ph.D. On criminal enterprises by the time you get out ..

Most importantly. nothing and no one is worth your freedom !!!

If you are not about " that life"... Do whatever you can to stay out !

Good job with this film !!

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) ...

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.

If you want to open your mind take a look at US incarceration rates trends over the past 25 years AND violent crime rates which have plummeted. google some charts on incarceration rates and violent crime/murder rates and superimpose them in your mind. AS incarceration rates rose, US murder and violent crime plunged. US murder is down 55%, gun murder rate down 59%. shortly after Us incarceration rates started falling again (and they have fallen the last four years) , murder started to creep up again News coverage of murder has increased, but murder has decreased (yes even mass shootings are down by 40%) . The peer reviewed science using anonymous surveys of prisoners shows on average they commit 20 serious crimes for every crime for which they are caught. 93% of all US murder is committed by prior criminals, 80% by prior felons or persons with 10 or more arrests (meaning 100 crimes). I don't care about people who live in buildings with heavy security like Cynthia Nixon, Danny Glover, have to say, they have not been victims of violent crimes. Russel Simmons? So now we have people with sexual assault allegations? Who will be lecturing us next? Harvey Weinstein?

As far as drug offenses the number of people in prison solely for recreational drug use is under 0.1% . This game has been played before bringing out as an example someone arrested for drugs, but not mentioning they were mugging people or beating people or also selling to children.

As far as comparing us to Japan-- come on. The confession rate for crime in Japoan is 95% the conviction rate is 99%. That is not exaggeration just google japan confession rate or japan conviction ate. In japan they can hold you in jail for a month without charging you and interrogating you 12 hours a day. If you want to get rid of the fourth and fifth amendments you can then talk about comparing the US to other countries. Even in Canada and Australia OJ Simpson could have been criminally tried a second time, something forbidden in our criminal defense system. Across the board in other developed democracies it is easier to get warrants, easier to wiretap, more evidence not specified on warrants is allowed in court. In most counties police do not need reasonable suspicion to search your car at all. In Germany and half of the developed world there is no such thing as a jury trial Criminals get away with more crime, we have more crime and therefore we have more people imprisoned. If you want to copy systems where prospective criminals are more certain to go to jail, therefore lowering crime before it is committed, then fine. Tell the ACLU they have to accept what they would call a police state