One of the best and most important documentaries of 2016, Toronto native Brett Story’s The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is a sharp and imaginative deconstruction of America’s prison-industrial complex that fixes its gaze not on the prison themselves but the economic and personal links to penitentiaries, charting the invisible links of the system and society. From a mining town in Kentucky dependent on a federal jail for employment, to a business that supplies prison-approved care packages to inmates and a tour through Quicken Loans corporate headquarters—12 vignettes together brilliantly compose a portrait of the inextricable bonds between mass incarceration and American life.
