Criminal Justice Videos: Select Streaming Videos

There are more than 6,000 men currently imprisoned at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola—three-quarters of them are there for life, and nearly 80 percent are African American. It's the end of the line for many convicted criminals in Louisiana, which has the highest incarceration rate of any state in the U.S. In this Atlantic original documentary, national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg goes inside Angola to speak with inmates and with warden Burl Cain, who has managed the prison for two decades. Cain and his colleagues grapple with the crucial question: What does rehabilitation look like when you're locked away for life?

An essential documentary, Brett Story's incisive, investigative and wide-ranging THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES is an examination of the prison and its place - social, economic and psychological - in American society. Filmmaker Brett Story excavates the often-unseen links and connections that prisons - and our system of mass incarceration - have on communities and industries all around us; from a blazing California mountainside where female prisoners fight raging wildfires to a Bronx warehouse that specializes in prison-approved care packages to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of new prison jobs to the street where Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson (and to the nearby St. Louis County, where African-Americans are still fending off police harassment, but of a different form).

Totally isolated from the outer world and deprived of virtually all forms of meaningful activity and social contact, inmates idle away their years in a limbo of concrete, steel, fluorescent light, and little else. In part one of this program, convicts speak out as ABC News anchor Ted Koppel explores solitary confinement in today's super-maximum security prisons, the quarters of men too violent or uncooperative for incarceration anywhere else. In part two, prison staff reveal their experiences with this harsh system as Mr. Koppel investigates the skyrocketing demand for correctional officers that has led to abbreviated training regimens and a decline in proficiency standards.

The United States is facing a crisis of mass incarceration with over 2.2 million people packed into its jails and prisons. To understand the human toll of this crisis, Rikers Island is a good place to start. Of the more than 7,500 people detained at Rikers Island on any given day, almost 80% have not yet been found guilty or innocent of the charges they face. All are at risk in the pervasive culture of violence that forces people to come to terms with what they must do for their own survival.

A documentary about juveniles who are serving life in prison without parole and their victims' families.

What happens when we lock up juvenile offenders in adult prisons? “Stickup Kid,” a FRONTLINE digital exclusive, tells the story of Alonza Thomas — sent to adult prison in California at age 16 — and how spending over a decade behind bars impacted him.

In this episode we take a look at the issue of juvenile sentencing, and consider two compelling cases in Michigan that raise the question of whether children convicted of murder should be subjected to life in prison without the possibility of parole. A battle is now waging to decide how to sentence juvenile killers, and what to do with the more than 360 juvenile lifers already sentenced to die in the state's prisons. Should a court decide if a child is sentenced to life imprisonment without parole?

What's it like to spend time in one of America's largest maximum-security juvenile prisons? Follow the lives of teenage inmates who must progress through the rigorous release program of Indiana's Pendleton Juvenile Correctional Facility in order to gain their freedom. Footage includes offenders completing Pendleton's gang education program and inmates struggling through drug and alcohol addiction.

From inside the maximum-security razor-wire fences of Indiana's Pendleton Juvenile Correctional Facility, this film documents the wrenching story of an inmate with deep-seated emotional trauma. This 19-year old offender reveals for the first time a childhood filled with abuse, attempted murder, and total abandonment.

Across the United States, approximately 80,000 inmates are locked down in solitary confinement. The practice has led to Congressional hearings, UN reports, and even prison hunger strikes. Is solitary inhumane-and even a form of torture? In this ABC News program, reporter Dan Harris volunteers to spend 48 hours "in the hole" at Denver County Jail in an effort to find out. Over the course of his brief but intense incarceration, Harris has to cope with a total lack of privacy, lights that stay on 24/7 for security reasons, barely edible food, and a previously unimaginable level of boredom. "The worst part is the screaming," says Harris. "The sounds of my fellow inmates losing their minds was incredibly unsettling.

Inside one state's ambitious attempt to decrease its use of solitary - and what happens when prisoners who have spent considerable time in isolation try to integrate back into society.

With extraordinary access, award-winning producer and director Dan Edge (Inside Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown, Kill/Capture, The Wounded Platoon) takes you to the epicenter of the raging debate about prison reform. Solitary Nation brings you an up-close, graphic look at a solitary confinement unit in Maine’s maximum security prison.

The Grey Area is an intimate look at women's issues in the criminal justice system and the unique experience of studying feminism behind bars. Through a series of captivating class discussions, headed by students from Grinnell College, a small group of female inmates at a maximum women's security prison in Mitchellville, Iowa, share their diverse experiences with motherhood, drug addiction, sexual abuse, murder, and life in prison. The women, along with their teachers, explore the grey area that is often invisible within the prison walls and delve into issues of race, class, sexuality and gender.

ABC News Anchor Diane Sawyer takes you on a journey into the world of women living behind bars in America's prison system today.

This project tells the stories of women who were incarcerated during pregnancy and facing the reality of giving their babies away at birth. The documentary focuses on three women who served sentences at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon.

In the 1970s, frustration over heroin-related urban crime led to the War on Drugs. Today, heroin is back. But the users, and the response, are very different.

Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs in 1971 and dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies. The 1980s saw a 126% increase in arrests for drug offenses. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, drug related prison population among African-Americans has increase by 27%, Latinos by 7%, and Caucasians by 15%. This episode examines the impact of the "Drug War" on the rights of individuals, minorities, and the judicial system. President Clinton's "Drug Czar," General Barry McCaffrey, discusses his views on drug policy and the state of the drug war. Also, an interview with the publisher of Prison Life magazine - a former drug pusher and undercover DEA agent, now an advocate for prisoners convicted in the "War of Drugs".

The war on drugs has been raging for more than 40 years. Over a trillion dollars has been spent, millions of people imprisoned, and countless thousands killed. And the result? Drugs are cheaper and more prevalent than ever before, and in a growing number of countries drug cartels are a major threat to national security. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, this documentary examines the UN-sanctioned war on drugs, charting its origins and its devastating impact on countries such as the U.S., Colombia, Russia, Mexico, and Brazil. The film features prominent statesmen including former presidents Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and César Gaviria of Colombia, who press for the urgent need to break the political taboo and support drug liberalization, per the conclusions of the 2011 Global Commission on Drug Policy.

For many governments in the new political landscape of Central Asia, supporting America's war on terror translates into a dangerous internal juggling act. This Wide Angle documentary examines the uneasy relationship between forces aligned against the Taliban and the drug lords who control the cultivation of much of the world's heroin. With militias and tribal factions diluting centralized power, the current opium crop in Afghanistan is among the largest ever. How will the international community deal with this fact of central Asian life? Can agricultural reforms be implemented that will equal the profitability of the opium trade? And how will the United States resolve a dilemma that pits the war on terror against the war on drugs? In addition, UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown talks with anchor Daljit Dhaliwal.

Drug use was a fact of life in the African-American community of Tulia, Texas-but when it became common in white neighborhoods, too, civic leaders grew alarmed. In 1999 they brought in an undercover agent, later found to be a racist with a criminal record, to conduct a sting operation. Dozens of black citizens were rounded up, given perfunctory trials, and handed down unusually stiff sentences of up to 99 years behind bars. This program profiles the Texas sting operation that seemed to be more of a war on blacks than a war on drugs, examining the ties between race, poverty, and the criminal justice system that the incident implies.

"On Black Friday 2012, four African-American teenagers stopped at a gas station to buy gum and cigarettes. One of them, Jordan Davis, argued with Michael Dunn, a white man parked beside them, over the volume of music playing in their car. The altercation turned to tragedy when Dunn fired 10 bullets at the unarmed boys, killing Davis almost instantly. 3 1/2 minutes, ten bullets explores the danger and subjectivity of Florida's Stand Your Ground self-defense laws by weaving Dunn's trial with a chorus of citizen and pundit opinions, and with Jordan Davis' parents' wrenching experiences in and out of the courtroom. As conversations about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddy Gray, and other victims of senseless violence play out on the national stage, 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets dives deep into the aftermath of Jordan Davis' murder. This intimate story of unnecessary loss in the face of insidious racism promotes seeing one another as human beings, with the hope that compassion will lessen the inevitability of racial bias, disparity and violence."

This Academy-Award nominated film is a powerful statement about racism in working-class America. It relates the stark facts of Vincent Chin's brutal murder. A 27-year-old Chinese-American, Chin was celebrating his last days of bachelorhood in a Detroit bar. An argument broke out between him and Ron Ebens, a Chrysler Motors foreman. Ebens shouted ethnic insults, the fight moved outside, and before onlookers, Ebens bludgeoned Chin to death with a baseball bat.In the ensuing trial, Ebens was let off with a suspended sentence and a small fine. Outrage filled the Asian-American community to the point where they organized an unprecedented civil rights protest. His bereaved mother, brought up to be self-effacing, successfully led a nationwide crusade for a retrial.This tragic story is interwoven with the whole fabric of timely social concerns. It addresses issues such as the failure of our judicial system to value every citizen's rights equally, the collapse of the automobile industry under pressure from Japanese imports, and the souring of the American dream for the blue collar worker. Widely acclaimed by the press, Who Killed Vincent Chin? is a memorable film for all audiences.

When a Chinese-American police officer kills an innocent, unarmed Black man in a darkened stairwell of a New York City housing project, it sets off a firestorm of emotion and calls for accountability. When he becomes the first NYPD officer convicted of an on-duty shooting in over a decade, the fight for justice becomes complicated, igniting one of the largest Asian-American protests in history, disrupting a legacy of solidarity, and putting an uneven legal system into sharp focus.

Hate Crimes in the Heartland is an award-winning documentary film and community outreach project that explores our national epidemic of hate crimes through the lens of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Emmy-winning producer Rachel Lyon explores two stories, over 90 years apart, that both dissect current issues of civil rights and the media's impact on justice. The film begins in Tulsa in 2012, where two white men drove through the African-American Greenwood neighborhood targeting blacks at random, killing three and leaving two others in critical condition. The film follows the murders, the ensuing social media uproar, the manhunt, and ultimate prosecution and death penalty sentencing of two suspects. The film ties this crime back to the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, an event that left 300 dead, 10,000 homeless, and 35 square blocks of the African-American community burnt to cinders. Sadly, the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot and the 2012 murders are not merely events of the past, but current events that we see echoed in society today, from Ferguson's Michael Brown to Florida's Trayvon Martin. This powerful documentary depicts how racial animosity has defined much of American culture for more than 90 years, and asks important questions about media, race, crime, and punishment.

What really happened on August 9th, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri? That afternoon, Officer Darren Wilson killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. ‘STRANGER FRUIT’ is the unraveling of what took place, told through the eyes of Mike Brown’s family.

In 1989, five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem were arrested and later convicted of raping a white woman in New York City's Central Park. They spent between 6 and 13 years in prison before a serial rapist confessed that he alone had committed the crime, leading to their convictions being overturned. Set against a backdrop of a decaying city beset by violence and racial tension, Ken Burns tells the story of that horrific crime, the rush to judgment by the police, a media clamoring for sensational stories and an outraged public, and the five lives upended by this miscarriage of justice.

Blood in the Face is a documentary film about white supremacy groups in North America. Inspired by a nonfiction book by author James Ridgeway, this documentary was largely shot in Cohoctah Township, Michigan. It focuses on a gathering of neo-Nazis, racists, and conspiracy theorists who expect people of color to ignite a Racial Holy War in the U.S.