Release Year: 2005

Duration: 83 min

Availability:

Related: Life & Culture, Politics, Women's Issues, Seventh Art Releasing

PRISON LULLABIES is the remarkable portrait of four young women living on the bad side of luck, struggling with drug addiction, arrested for dealing, prostitution, grand larceny and serving prison time with one common bond; they were all pregnant at the time of their arrest, and all have given birth behind bars. For these women who are on intimate terms with sexual abuse and assault, destitution, poverty and addition, the Taconic Corrections Facility in New York State offers a rare glimmer of hope. Taconic allows the women to keep their babies for the first 18 months of their lives while insisting that the mothers participate in a rigorous series of classes that range from basic child care to anger management, and drug counseling. Each woman is released in the course of filming, and each must choose, minute to minute, whether to find a job, break the cycle of relapse and re-arrest, or to pick up the crack-pipe, abandon the child and return to the streets. Shot in cinema verite style, PRISON LULLABIES addresses these issues by allowing the audience the opportunity to observe and listen as the stories of the inmate mothers unfold- in their own time and their own words.