College Behind Bars
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NEH Application Cover Sheet (TR-256166) Media Projects Production PROJECT DIRECTOR Anne Harrington E-mail: [email protected] VP Content, Natl Engagement Interactive Media Phone: 703-998-2458 3939 Campbell Ave. Fax: 703-845-8086 Arlington, VA 22206-3440 USA Field of expertise: Filmmaking INSTITUTION Greater Washington Educational Telecommunications Assoc. Arlington, VA 22206-3440 APPLICATION INFORMATION Title: College Behind Bars Grant period: From 2017-08-01 to 2019-01-31 Project field(s): Social Sciences, Other Description of project: College Behind Bars is a two-hour documentary directed by Lynn Novick and produced by Sarah Botstein, which brings to life the practice of liberal arts education among inmates in American prisons. The project is a co-production of WETA, the leading public broadcasting station in the nation’s capital and the second-largest producing station of PBS programming, and Skiff Mountain Films, a documentary production company based in New York City. Novick and Botstein are longtime filmmaking partners of documentarian Ken Burns, who is serving as Executive Producer. The project is produced in association with Burns’ production company, Florentine Films. Slated for national broadcast on PBS in 2018, College Behind Bars will be accompanied by a multi-platform digital media campaign. BUDGET Outright Request 500,000.00 Cost Sharing 1,803,119.00 Matching Request 0.00 Total Budget 2,303,119.00 Total NEH 500,000.00 GRANT ADMINISTRATOR Elizabeth Collaton E-mail: [email protected] 3939 Campbell Ave. Phone: 703-998-2608 Arlington, VA 22206-3440 Fax: 703-845-8086 USA COLLEGE BEHIND BARS A CO-PRODUCTION OF WETA AND SKIFF MOUNTAIN FILMS Table of Contents Section: Page: Narrative 1 Script 21 Bibliography 52 Resumes and Letters of Commitment 54 Description of Work Sample 120 Budget 122 2. Narrative A. Nature of the request: College Behind Bars is a two-hour documentary directed by Lynn Novick and produced by Sarah Botstein, which brings to life the practice of liberal arts education among inmates in American prisons. The project is a co-production of WETA, the leading public broadcasting station in the nation’s capital and the second-largest producing station of PBS programming, and Skiff Mountain Films, a documentary production company based in New York City. Novick and Botstein are longtime filmmaking partners of documentarian Ken Burns, who is serving as Executive Producer. The project is produced in association with Burns’ production company, Florentine Films. Slated for national broadcast on PBS in 2018, College Behind Bars will be accompanied by a multi- platform digital media campaign, an extensive educational outreach initiative to engage teachers and students across curricula, and a national community engagement campaign designed to prompt a serious assessment of many issues surrounding higher education and criminal justice in the United States. We believe that the project strongly aligns with the priorities of the NEH Common Good initiative. We are requesting a production grant of $500,000 from the NEH. The total project budget is $2,303,119. B. Program synopsis: College Behind Bars immerses us in the intellectual and personal journeys of men and women who participate in a rigorous liberal arts college program as inmates in New York State prisons. Through portraits of several student/inmates filmed over the course of three years and an examination of the broader context in which they study, the two-hour documentary examines critical issues about criminal justice and liberal arts education, while raising complex questions about the possibility of moral, emotional, and intellectual transformation. The students’ stories take place against a backdrop of the present-day crisis of mass incarceration in the United States, and inside a criminal justice system in urgent need of reform. But College Behind Bars is not primarily a film about criminal justice. Nor is it a story of faulty trials or exoneration; indeed, many of the students whose stories we tell were convicted of serious and sometimes violent felonies. Rather, the film is an examination of the lives of men and women, many of whom are serving lengthy prison sentences, who are transformed by their participation in a demanding liberal arts education. Told through the experiences of some of America’s most marginalized citizens, it is an exploration of how education can help foster participation in a democratic society, and how knowledge in the humanities can enrich American lives. The incarcerated students we come to know – most of whom did not graduate from high school and are poor, black or Latino – are enrolled in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), a program of the elite Bard College in upstate New York, which holds them to the same high academic and intellectual standards that the school sets for undergraduates on its main campus. BPI enrolls nearly three hundred students at six New York State correctional facilities, offering approximately sixty courses each semester. Some students are in two-year associate degree 1 programs; others are pursuing four-year bachelor’s degrees. We follow a selection of these students in a course of study that engages a wide range of disciplines, from the tragedies of Shakespeare and Sophocles to Middle-East politics and history; macroeconomics to Mandarin language; linear algebra to existential philosophy; Whitman and Emerson to the history of the Silk Road; discrete mathematics to the Irish in America; as well as computer science, molecular biology, bioethics, and public health. As viewers, we learn alongside the students, immersed in the engaging and intellectually rich content of their classroom discussions and independent research. We get to know the students who participate in BPI’s extra-curricular debate team, documenting their extensive preparation and inter-mural competitions, including a widely reported victory against the team from Harvard College. And we come to know professors, administrators, corrections officers, elected officials, victims and their families, and others whose lives intersect with those of the student/ inmates. The narrative of the film unfolds through real life, cinema verité footage taking us from the first admissions interviews to introductory courses, through a range of academic classes, disciplines, and senior research projects, all the way to graduation and, in some cases, release from prison into the outside world. We follow the students through triumphs and setbacks, personal crises, intellectual revelations, and moments of personal growth and transcendence. Interspersed with these personal and pedagogical stories are scenes providing a broader historical and intellectual context for our characters’ lives and education. We place the BPI experiment within the recent history of the American criminal justice system and the larger story of higher education in the United States. Through a character-driven, emotionally complex, intellectually rich journey into the particular experiences of a handful of students in one prison college program, we intend to craft a universal story about education, justice, the power of humanities scholarship, and the promise of American democracy. C. Humanities content: College Behind Bars offers a complex, multi-dimensional understanding of themes in American education and criminal justice, questions of personal responsibility, the possibility of rehabilitation, and the very idea of freedom. Humanities content will be conveyed in the film in three key ways: First, we will experience college education alongside the students we follow. In classroom lectures and discussions, in debate tournaments, in filmed interviews, and in study sessions, we will learn alongside the inmates as they engage in scholarship about a wide range of humanities subjects. Many of the film’s scenes will include students and faculty discussing, studying, and contemplating the rich content of a liberal arts curriculum. Second, through interviews and discussions among students, we will watch as they make connections between the subjects they are studying in school and issues that powerfully resonate in their own lives. We will witness how literature, philosophy, economics, anthropology, history, drama and other disciplines can serve as effective lenses into the choices they have made in the past, and the directions they will take as they move forward with their lives. “In looking at Othello, Macbeth, Oedipus, I try to extract who I am,” one student 2 tells us on camera, “I’m trying to figure out what brought me here? Why have I done the things I’ve done? Is my life a tragedy?” Finally, several scenes will provide historical background for the present-day stories in the film, relating the history of subjects ranging from the emergence of mass incarceration to the history of liberal arts education, through archival materials, on-screen titles, and interviews. Humanities ideas and themes that will be addressed in the documentary will include: Liberal arts and American democracy: College Behind Bars is not a traditional historical documentary. While there will be short scenes interspersed throughout the film providing historical background, the majority of the story will be told through present-day footage depicting life and education inside prisons. But as an examination and an appreciation of the power of a liberal arts education, the historical and pedagogical idea of liberal arts will be a recurrent theme throughout the film. The concept of liberal arts originates in antiquity; artes