Unmaking the Prison Image – Details, episodes & analysis

What does it mean to learn filmmaking as a practice of abolition?

In this first episode of Unmaking the Prison Image, host Pooja Rangan speaks with filmmakers and educators Christopher Harris, Brett Story, and Thanh Tran about how documentary shapes what we think we know about prisons, and how filmmaking can help us unlearn those assumptions.

The conversation traces how media literacy becomes a form of political education, from community radio to experimental cinema and a self-taught film collective inside San Quentin prison. Thanh recounts teaching himself filmmaking from a closet full of unused cameras inside prison. Brett reflects on learning narrative responsibility through activist media work. Chris asks how carceral images shape perception, and how dissonant filmmaking can interrupt them.

Together, they ask: What allows an image to do abolitionist work? And how can filmmaking become a collective practice for imagining worlds beyond incarceration?

Citations:

• bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators”
• Lisa Guenther, “Seeing Like a Cop: A Critical Phenomenology of Whiteness as Property”
• Adamu Chan, “People, Not Stories: Pathways to Accountability in Prison Documentaries”
• Rizvana Bradley, “Picturing Catastrophe: The Visual Politics of Racial Reckoning”
• Why Look at Prisons? (forthcoming) by Brett Story & Pooja Rangan

Media Resources

• Christopher Harris films
• The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (dir. Brett Story)
• Uncuffed podcast
• Finding Má (dir. Thanh Tran, forthcoming)

Full transcripts for each episode are available at https://ias.ucsc.edu/unmaking-the-prison-image/.

Unmaking the Prison Image is a production of Visualizing Abolition, a public scholarship initiative at the University of California, Santa Cruz, directed by Gina Dent and Rachel Nelson. Additional support comes from Amherst College.

Music credit: Pray by Terri Lynne Carrington and Social Science

Welcome to Unmaking the Prison Image, a three-episode series exploring the role documentary film can play in imagining a world without prisons. Host Pooja Rangan speaks with filmmakers, scholars, and system-impacted artists and organizers who are rethinking the role documentary plays in shaping how we see, and imagine, prisons.

Unmaking the Prison Image is a production of Visualizing Abolition, a public scholarship initiative at the University of California, Santa Cruz, directed by Gina Dent and Rachel Nelson. Podcast produced by Alex Moore, Louise Leong, and Pooja Rangan. Eric “Maserati E” Abercrombie is our editor and sound designer. The theme music for Visualizing Abolition is Pray by Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science. Our cover art features an image from Christopher Harris’s still/here. Transcripts available at https://ias.ucsc.edu/unmaking-the-prison-image/

What happens when entertainment joins forces with law enforcement? Who gets hurt, and who--or what--evades accountability? 

In Episode 3 of Unmaking the Prison Image, host Pooja Rangan is joined by filmmaker Davit Osit, critical criminologist Michelle Brown, and formerly incarcerated policy advocate and founder of America on Trial, Inc. Vidal Guzman to discuss the social costs of carceral entertainment, from reality TV shows filmed inside prisons to self-appointed vigilantes and "predator catchers." 

Davit Osit reflects on the ethical contradictions of documentary filmmaking, including his own film Predators, and walking the tightrope of complicity and challenge. Michelle Brown situates "carceral entertainment" within a broader political landscape that exhausts our imagination and normalizes punitive responses to harm. Vidal Guzman talks about how incarcerated people experience the physical and legal harms of incarcerated reality shows like 60 Days In and his work on the #AIRS (Abolish Incarcerated Reality Shows) campaign.

Citations:

• AIRS Campaign (Abolish Incarcerated Reality Shows)
• America on Trial, Inc.
• The Appalachian Justice Research Center
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.
• Michelle Brown, The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society and Spectacle 
• Michelle Brown and Travis Linneman, Under the Gun: Criminology Goes Back to the Movies
• Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance, Crimesploitation: Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Television
• Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
• Pooja Rangan, The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability

Media Resources:

• Predators (dir. David Osit, 2025)
• The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (dir. Brett Story, 2016)
• Bulletproof (dir. Todd Chandler, 2020)
• Riotsville, USA (dir. Sierra Pettengill, 2022)

Unmaking the Prison Image is a production of Visualizing Abolition, a public scholarship initiative at the University of California, Santa Cruz, directed by Gina Dent and Rachel Nelson. Additional support comes from Amherst College. Full transcripts for all episodes are available at https://ias.ucsc.edu/unmaking-the-prison-image/.

Theme music for Visualizing Abolition is Pray by Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science. Our cover art features an image from Christopher Harris’s still/here.

This episode includes discussion of rape and sexual violence. We recognize that these topics may be difficult or distressing for some listeners, so please take care while listening and feel free to pause or step away at any time.

What happens when abolition meets its most common objection?

In Episode 2 of Unmaking the Prison Image, host Pooja Rangan brings together curator and scholar Rachel Nelson, documentary scholar Laliv Melamed, and feminist filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj to confront the question that often marks the limit of abolitionist imagination: “But what about the rapists and murderers?”

Drawing from personal experience and feminist media practice, the conversation examines how rape becomes a powerful moral and emotional boundary in debates about prisons across multiple geopolitical contexts.

Citations

• Rachel Nelson, “Time in the Shape of a Prison” (forthcoming)
• Nada Elia, “Weaponizing Rape”
• K. Lalitha and Deepa Dhanraj, Rupture, Loss, and Living: Minority Women Speak about Post-Conflict Life.
• Laliv Melamed, Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence                             
• Pooja Rangan, The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability

Additional Resources

• Aya Gruber, The Feminist War on Crime 
• Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie, Abolition. Feminism. Now.
• Prabha Kotiswaran, “Governance Feminism in the Post-Colony: India’s Rape Law Reforms of 2013”

• Deepa Dhanraj films

Unmaking the Prison Image is a production of Visualizing Abolition, a public scholarship initiative at the University of California, Santa Cruz, directed by Gina Dent and Rachel Nelson. Additional support comes from Amherst College.

Theme music for Visualizing Abolition is Pray by Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science. Our cover art features an image from Christopher Harris’s still/here. Full episode transcripts are available at https://ias.ucsc.edu/unmaking-the-prison-image/.