San Quentin State Prison is notorious for a number of reasons. Located north of San Francisco, it is home to the nation’s largest death row — 737 people when Gov. Gavin Newsom put a moratorium on executions in 2019. San Quentin has been featured in movies, books, podcasts, and more, and earlier in 2020 held about 3,700 people.
San Quentin is also home to the Victim Offender Education Group (VOEG), run by the Insight Prison Project. The program brings together victims of violence and people who have caused harm for an intense healing process that begins with the recognition that those two identities often overlap. The group uses restorative justice practices to pursue true accountability by acknowledging harm, taking responsibility for it, and working to repair it.
“The Prison Within” is an amazing new documentary, directed by Katherin Hervey and narrated by Hill Harper, that reveals the healing power of VOEG and the humanity and growth of the men who take its journey.
In becoming the world’s most relentless jailer, the U.S. has in large part disregarded the root causes of violence and our national responsibility in allowing them to sustain and even thrive. The men in this film — Samuel W. Johnson, Sr., Nythell “Nate” Collins, Eddie Herena, to name just a few of the sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands at the heart of the film — tell their stories and reveal the way that unaddressed childhood trauma overpowered them and steered their lives. But they haven’t given up on themselves.
Troy Williams spent 18 years at San Quentin before being released in 2014. Today he is an advocate for justice transformation as well as an accomplished storyteller. In the film he reflects on the trauma so many carry and says, “We have to learn another person’s story before we give up on them and throw them away.”
The trauma is everywhere. “I have yet to meet a person in prison who hasn’t been a victim for most, if not all, of their life,” says Jaimie Karroll, a former facilitator for the Insight Prison Project, herself a childhood kidnapping and assault survivor.
The film features experts like former EJUSA board member Sonya Shah, a founder of the Ahisma Collective, which offers restorative justice practices; Dionne Niemi, an activist who also works with law enforcement to address their trauma; and sujatha baliga, one of the nation’s leading practitioners of restorative justice and a senior fellow at Impact Justice. All are survivors of violence.
“If we don’t have explanations, we can’t possibly figure out how to make sure that [violence] doesn’t happen again,” says baliga in the film.
“The Prison Within” gives viewers a remarkable insight into the explanations but also most crucially the solution…healing.
You can rent this film from a number of media outlets, including Amazon, Apple TV/iTunes, Google, on demand from your cable provider, and more.
