Trapped: Mental Illness in America’s Prisons.

Trapped: Mental Illness in America’s Prisons. This is NOT to be missed. The first 5 star rating of the year and the best project I’ve seen in some time. BRAVO! I promise you this will be an HBO/Showtime doc or even at Sundance at some point. Important, raw, moving, SEE IT! I recorded a podcast with creator Jenn Ackerman,
hear the podcast..

What started out as an assignment for school has produced a piece that has changed my life and hopefully will do the same for the people that view it. That was my hope when producing it at least. Ten weeks ago, we (my grad class at OU) were given the assignment to create a magazine including the brand, the mission statement and of course the content.

For this project, I decided to focus on the mental health crisis, specifically in prisons. This brought me to the CPTU inside the Kentucky State Reformatory.

My intention was to make a multimedia piece that made the viewer feel what I felt when I was there. There were days that I was extremely scared and others that I left thinking how much someone on the outside missed them. Some days, I had to remind myself that many of these men had done heinous things.

I saw them cry. I saw them hit themselves so hard in the head that they bled. I saw them throw things at the officers.

I left the prison feeling the same way the warden and the doctors do - wanting to help these men that have nowhere else to go but feeling helpless. All I could do was make a piece that brings others in and hopefully makes them feel for these men, the doctors, the warden and the issue at large. There needs to be a shift in the way our society sees mental illness. We don’t need to just house these people and maybe prison isn’t the place for them.

I hope you all feel something from this piece. Please let me know what you think. Visit my project at www.indepth.jennackerman.com