NCJ Number
78698
Date Published
1980
Length
0 pages
Annotation
This film documents a successful inmate program at Matsqui Institution in Abbotsfort, British Columbia, which brought theater people from the outside into the prison setting for drama work with inmates.
Abstract
Both inmate participants and outside visitors chat about their common experience in working together to create a dramatic production within an institutional setting. Short scenes are also filmed at rehearsals, while the actors are being made up, and at the final performance. All reactions are positive. Outsiders comment on new insights gained about prison life and the basic humanity of prisoners -- above all their motivation and response to the common project. Inmates affirm the sense of liberty they enjoy while participating in a creative, engrossing activity which seems to take them 'outside' the usual prison routine. One middle-aged inmate speaks of discovering a vocation for the first time in his life, while another expresses his pleasure at being able to continue acting because he had studied drama and worked in the theater prior to imprisonment. Recurring themes are that prisoners are people, that their personalities have more dimensions than the criminal one, that a drama project provides release from institutional repression, and that this experience has bearing on the inmates' eventual readjustment to the outside world.