A very beautiful and very difficult examination of the American criminal justice system by the Marshall Project.
The impact of America’s punishment policies is often measured in numbers: there are now 2.2 million people in our jails and prisons; one in a hundred and fifteen adults is confined behind bars; our inmate population is 4 times larger than it was in 1980. We Are Witnesses, a collection of short videos, offers a very different sort of calculation: the human cost of locking up so many citizens for so many years. The project comprises 19 videos, each between two and six minutes long. Taken together, they present a rare 360-degree portrait of the state of crime and punishment in the United States.