UB Law School Professor Teresa Miller brought learning from the classroom into a maximum-security prison when she and a small group of first-year law students filmed a documentary at the Attica Holding Facility in Wyoming County, NY.
The documentary, titled Encountering Attica, chronicles the students' interviews with several inmates serving long sentences in the prison that holds over 2,000 men.
Encountering Attica brings viewers behind bars and exposes the prison system, which Miller believes affects society profoundly.
"Our society is being shaped by the prison systems," Miller said. "It's about making [the inmates] visible when prisons and occupants tend to be invisible."
The invisibility continues even though over 7.2 million people were held in a US federal or state prison or local jail in 2006, according to the US Department of Justice's Web site.
Buffalo's seven prisons are no different. Miller said that the only people who actually see these institutions are the people who work in the US prison system.
The documentary focuses on the inmates who are making the most of their situations by becoming involved in programs like the Community Awareness Project and the Alpha Project, in which the inmates share their life experiences and lessons they have learned with high school students.
"They're doing the time their way, instead of letting the time do them," Miller said.
Every five weeks, the students visited Attica to talk with the inmates and to question them about the prison system.
The camera crews followed the students after these encounters to capture the impact of the project on their personal lives. The inmates also kept a journal to record the students' visits.
"We're willing to have a conversation - to seriously talk with the inmates," said Siana Mclean, a first-year law student with the project. "They were easy to talk to...I was surprised I was so comfortable."
The documentary reveals that the inmates are not the ones benefiting from this experience; rather, the inmates put their lives on the line when they chose to speak with the students.
"I think it's really important to understand prisons and the effects of locking people up," Miller said, adding that word spreads fast in prisons and inmates who speak out are often labeled snitches or moles.
Mclean's perspective on legal doctrines changed after conducting interviews with inmates.
"To open ourselves up outside of the law classroom and gain experience...gives you a more practical application of what you're learning," Mclean said. She explained that many people have preconceived notions about the prison system and their inmates.
The documentary is part of the Projecting Law Project at UB, which aims to use new media such as blogging, podcasting, and video blogging to present important issues to the public, according to the Projecting Law Web site. Keeping with the goal of using new media, the group posted clips of Encountering Attica on YouTube.com.
The latest version of the film, which is still in progress, will be screened at 4 p.m. on May 1 in O'Brian Hall.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
