Are prisons supposed to rehabilitate convicts, punish them, or simply keep them off the streets? The answer depends on who is being asked. This program explores the current state of prisons in America and examines their conflicting mandates. The Directors of the National Prison Project of the ACLU and the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, the Governor of South Dakota, an Arizona sheriff, adult and juvenile inmates, and others consider...

This program traces the history of world criminal justice from the Code of Hammurabi, through ancient Greece and Rome, to the Middle Ages. It covers such topics as criminal justice in India, China, Japan, and the Middle East; English debtors' prisons; punishments for colonial witchcraft; the development of criminology; and modern criminal justice systems.

In the Ventura School, California's showcase juvenile prison, inmates discuss how drugs and alcohol, lack of family support, and gang involvement have influenced their lives. The program also looks at Adult Time For Adult Crime, a program in Dade County, FL, which sends more kids to adult court than any other county in the U.S. Those who prosecute, defend, and judge young offenders explain how our society has come to the point where the age of the...

Most prison documentaries focus on the inmates. This sobering program features guards and prisoners alike, giving the viewer two interpretations of life at Ohio's Warren Correctional Institution. From the smallest detail-how cellmates rig a shabby partition around their toilet-to the cynicism and frontline sociology with which the corrections officers analyze their surroundings, the video clearly elucidates the effects of prolonged monotony and confinement...

Angola Penitentiary has its own radio station, its own magazine, and-most notably-its own highly organized evangelical ministry. It is also a working farm, tended in large part by compliant, nonviolent inmates. What forces are at work in the once-notorious Louisiana institution? Have its residents embraced religion sincerely, or is Angola a focal point of sophisticated brainwashing? This program invites viewers to consider those questions. Examining...

Trevor McDonald goes inside one of America's most notorious maximum security prisons - Indiana State - where he comes face-to-face with 12 condemned men awaiting execution. In the first of two episodes, Trevor meets Benjamin Ritchie, who faces the death penalty for killing a policeman. Ritchie talks about the moments before his capture and how he felt on hearing the sentence. John Stephenson, who assassinated three people on the orders of a criminal...

This episode of Investigative Reports examines Garrett House, a Camden, New Jersey, halfway house run by Volunteers of America. This facility exclusively serves violent offenders who are hoping that this will be their last step before being granted parole. Although still technically inmates supervised by the State Department of Corrections, they are allowed to work in the community and begin to re-integrate into society. This program explores the...

Some mistakes are fixable. Wrongful conviction and subsequent execution is not. In this program, ABC News correspondent John Donvan traces the history of the death penalty in the U.S. since 1935 while capturing the views of George W. Bush and Illinois governor George Ryan. Then, Gerald Kogan, former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, and Dudley Sharp, director of Justice for All, join anchor Chris Wallace to discuss the use of DNA evidence...

More women are in prison in America than anywhere else in the world. Follow Trevor McDonald in this first part of a two-part documentary as he ventures inside two jails that hold some of America's most notorious women criminals, Indiana Women's Prison and the state's Rockville Correctional Facility. Trevor witnesses a world of seduction and manipulation as inmates prey on each other and those who guard them.

As time creeps by, the exercise of reward and punishment and the friction of social inequality within the microsociety of prison take their toll, fraying nerves among the prisoners and generating anxiety among the guards. In this episode, two inmates form an unlikely alliance-and the guards are taken by surprise when three prisoners launch a nighttime revolt. Contains harsh, inflammatory, and explicit language.