http:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/audio\/2012\/07\/film-video-artists-and-offender-reentry\/<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\nLen Sipes:\u00a0 From the nation’s capital this is DC Public Safety.\u00a0 I’m your host Leonard Sipes.\u00a0 Today’s topic, ladies and gentlemen, is film and video on offender reentry.\u00a0 We have three people in the studio today, three experts, in terms of doing videos on the topic of offender reentry.\u00a0 We have Gabriela Bulisova.\u00a0 We have Greg Upwall, and Yavar Moghimi.\u00a0 Gabriela is an independent photographer and instructor in Corcoran College of Art and Design.\u00a0 Her website is gabrielabulisova.photoshelter.com. And Greg and Yavar, they’re graduates of the George Washington University Institute of Documentary Filmmaking.\u00a0 They produced a film called Released to Life that’s gotten a lot of acclaim.\u00a0 It’s currently under snagfilms.com and you can also go to releasedtolifemovie.com.\u00a0 And to Gabriela, Greg and Yavar, welcome to DC Public Safety.<\/p>\n
Greg Upwall:\u00a0 All right.\u00a0 Thanks for having us.<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 Thank you.\u00a0 Pleasure.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 All Gabriele, how badly did I screw up the name?<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 You did great.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Did I get it?\u00a0 Was I in the ballpark even?<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 Absolutely right.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 All three of you \u2026 I’ve had a lot of fun with talking with all three of you over the course of the last couple months.\u00a0 And Greg and Yavar, we put together Released a Life.\u00a0 I had a small part in terms of advising you.\u00a0 That video won a slew of awards.\u00a0 It won number one in the first place award in the Washington, DC Film Festival.\u00a0 It’s won first place awards for a lot of film festivals.\u00a0 That’s an interesting concept, Released to Life.\u00a0 Tell me a little bit about the film.<\/p>\n
Greg Upwall:\u00a0 Well the film is basically a short documentary that we produced as students in the Documentary Filmmaking Center.\u00a0 And it’s a composite character of different folks, basically, going through the reentry process in different stages and having served a different amount of time.\u00a0 And kind of looking at the challenges that they’re facing coming back into society.\u00a0 And having some experts kind of also weighing in on what the challenges that they see are.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Gabriela, you’ve done video, you’ve done still photography, you’ve worked this concept in a variety of mediums.\u00a0 Why did you chose offender reentries?\u00a0 I can think of puppies, I can think of children, I can think of older people, I can think of veterans coming home from war, I can think of a lot of other topics that are probably easier to do than people coming out of the prison system.\u00a0 Why did you choose that topic?<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 I actually was introduced to the topic indirectly.\u00a0 I was in process seeking to work on incarceration and reentry.\u00a0 I was invited to speak at a [PH] colloquium at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.\u00a0 And the topic was Women and War.\u00a0 And I worked with refugees, primarily Iraqi refugees for quite some time.\u00a0 I worked with them in Syria, in Middle East, and in Washington, DC.\u00a0 So my first thought was I have to go to Iraq and document women in the war zone.\u00a0 And then because I teach, my schedule, especially travel schedule, is quite limited.\u00a0 I thought I might look the word war through a deeper or wider prism.\u00a0 And I looked at war as conflict, as injustice, as violence.\u00a0 And connected then conflict and women.\u00a0 And did some research locally and found an organization called Our Place DC.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Oh yes.\u00a0 A fabulous, fabulous place.<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 Absolutely.\u00a0 Wonderful, small, underfunded organization –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 – that deals with gender-specific issues and does tremendous work helping women who are coming out of prison to readjust to society.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Okay.\u00a0 So you like the easy topics of life.<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 War in Iraq, women returning from the prison system.\u00a0 Greg, let me go over to you.\u00a0 You were involved; you and I have been talking more than anybody within this room about this concept of offenders coming out of the prison system.\u00a0 Look, you guys are filmmakers, I’m part of government.\u00a0 I’m stodgy, I’ve been around for a long time, I’m jaded, the system gets on my nerves.\u00a0 You’re filmmakers, you’re artists, you have a fresh perspective, you have that artist soul.\u00a0 You’re taking a look at the concept of people coming out of the prison system, why?\u00a0 Greg, I’m going to start with you.<\/p>\n
Greg Upwall:\u00a0 Well it’s a good question, Len.\u00a0 The group that made the film at GW, none of us really had a strong, personal history with the subject except for one student who was a DC native.\u00a0 The others of us had a lot to learn.\u00a0 We chose the topic because we felt that it was an important one, clearly.\u00a0 But I don’t think any of us really understood what we were getting into.\u00a0 We quickly realized that the situation is quite bleak when you look at the numbers coming out and the statistics of recidivism, and the lack of funding that exists.\u00a0 And so as we began to conceptualize what this salient message of our film should be, we realized that our interest was to make a personal story out of the film. And we realized that many people can quickly get desensitized when you look at statistics and numbers, but sort of reflecting our own personal discovery was that these are human beings.\u00a0 And I remember coming to this realization.\u00a0 And a lot of the listeners out there might think well of course that’s the case, but we really connected with people.\u00a0 We met people with real lives that clearly we could empathize with, that clearly had gotten on the wrong side of a situation.\u00a0 And that was really where our passion and our interests kind of grounded itself.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 And that was apparent in the film.\u00a0 If you look at Released to Life and SnagFilms, or if you go to Releasedtolifemovie.com, you see that.\u00a0 You can see the power of the filmmaking.\u00a0 You can see the power of the stories. But Gabriela, I’ve seen your photography.\u00a0 The question is more this, you’re bringing a fresh perspective to it.\u00a0 You’re bringing the artist soul to it.\u00a0 What you’ve just said all of us within the correctional or criminological community we know.\u00a0 What is it that the artist sees that we’re not seeing, in terms of telling that story, anybody.\u00a0 Gabriela, go ahead.<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 Exactly right.\u00a0 As I said, I was new to the issue of incarceration and reentry.\u00a0 And working with the women, I produced a combination of audio and still images.\u00a0 I produced a project called Convictions where the women directly tell their own stories in their own voices.\u00a0 And then I moved on to \u2026 then I started doing more research and I learned, as Greg said, the overwhelming statistics of the number of people just in DC, ten percent of DC population being incarcerated or having a criminal record and so on.\u00a0 But still those are numbers, statistics.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 What did you feel in your heart?<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 Right.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 What was going through your heart, your mind, your soul when you were dealing with this topic?\u00a0 That’s what I’m interested in.<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 As a documentary photographer, as a photo journalist, you want to learn more.\u00a0 You ask questions why.\u00a0 And when I \u2026 I moved from working with women to working with men.\u00a0 And when I started working on a new project called Inside Outside, I was reminded of what an Iraqi friend of mine told me when the War on Iraq began.\u00a0 He said, “I wish I can tattoo faces onto Iraqi people.”\u00a0 And what he really meant was I wish that people here can see the real people, the real faces of the Iraqis, and thus we can connect with real people, so we can turn them from mass numbers or from news headlines into real people.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 So you felt that the people that you were dealing with were rather anonymous, they lived anonymous lives.\u00a0 And somehow, some way through your artistry you would try to capture who they are as human beings.<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 Absolutely right.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Yavar, you have to weigh in on this subject.<\/p>\n
Yavar Moghimi:\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 I think the whole process of documentary filmmaking is about storytelling in the end.\u00a0 And so especially making social documentaries, you want to tell the story that most people don’t know.\u00a0 Or if they know, they don’t know why they should care about it.\u00a0 So that’s \u2026 it doesn’t take much to listen to these people’s stories and realize the struggles that they’re facing and the limitations in a lot of the services that are out there to really help people transition back into society.\u00a0 And then when you sort of look at it from even a financial perspective, too, you kind of wonder what are we doing in terms of all the money that’s being poured into this, and people are being sent back.\u00a0 So it’s not only affecting the people themselves, but the tax payers as well.\u00a0 And so we try to craft the message that was geared towards this is an issue that you should care about whether you know somebody who’s gone through the criminal system or not.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 So why \u2026 and from a filmmaker’s perspective, from a creative perspective \u2026 what are we doing, what are we not doing to spread that message?\u00a0 Because when I sit and talk \u2026 in the past with my dearly departed mother about the subject of reentry, she said, “Leonard, for the love of heavens we’ve got the elderly to take care of, we’ve got \u2026 ”\u00a0 I’ve told this story a dozen times.\u00a0 The listeners of this radio program have heard this story a dozen times.\u00a0 “We’ve got the elderly to take care of, we’ve got school kids to take care of.”\u00a0 My wife who was Vice President of PTA said, “Leonard, the money needs to go to the kids not to the people who have done harm to other human beings.\u00a0 We’ve got to start with the kids, that’s where the great bulk of the money needs to go.”\u00a0 We have a society that basically goes, “Ah, they’re not my favorite people.\u00a0 I’m not quite sure I’m interested in this topic.”\u00a0 And I’ll throw out a statistic just to consider.\u00a0 That 80% of people caught up in the criminal justice system have substance abuse histories.\u00a0 Approximately ten percent when they’re in the prison system get treatment.\u00a0 So basically what we’re doing is not helping them transform, to cross that bridge from a tax burden to a tax payer.\u00a0 We’re not doing that.\u00a0 Why, is the question.\u00a0 And I want to ask you guys.\u00a0 Not as criminologists, but as artists.\u00a0 Why are we not doing that?<\/p>\n
Greg Upwall:\u00a0 Maybe I can jump in there, Len.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Yeah, Greg.<\/p>\n
Greg Upwall:\u00a0 I think what we sort of \u2026 like I said before \u2026 what we really recognized is that a lot of people see the issue as an us and them situation.\u00a0 It doesn’t affect them.\u00a0 It’s a situation you can read about in the news; you hear statistics and so forth.\u00a0 But quickly we were sort of impacted emotionally by the idea that it’s certainly not us and them.\u00a0 And that families are involved.\u00a0 And our whole justice system, we’re all \u2026 we take our civics classes growing up and we’re led to believe that our constitution provides fair justice and that once you’ve paid the due for your crime that you’re able to move on with your life.\u00a0 And we realize it’s just not that easy.\u00a0 Our goal quickly became \u2026 as I know myself and several others in our crew \u2026 we’re not the type to quickly give the benefit of the doubt to a criminal.\u00a0 I came at it with my own biases.\u00a0 But we realized that our goal ought to be to show that you can’t treat it as a black and white situation.\u00a0 And it’s also become an issue that’s being done a disservice by reality TV programs have tend to portray prisons as violent places, and all criminals as violent people, and it just wasn’t the case.\u00a0 We couldn’t avoid that fact.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 I talked to an employer who watched Hard Time on one of the cable stations.\u00a0 And basically said, “You want me to hire somebody from there?”\u00a0 And I said, “Look, I’ve been in and out of prisons hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.\u00a0 It’s not like that.”\u00a0 I said, “You have that that goes on in prisons on a periodic basis, but the overwhelming majority of prisons you go into, they’re some of the safest places on the face of the earth, believe it or not.\u00a0 I’ve walked through dozens and dozens of prisons totally unescorted, totally without an ounce of fear.”\u00a0 But that’s what they see.\u00a0 So if that’s what they see on the six o’clock news, if that’s what they see in Hard Time, if that’s what they read about in the morning paper, that doesn’t create a lot of sympathy for what they call \u201cex-cons\u201d.<\/p>\n
Greg Upwall:\u00a0 Yeah.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Gabriela, you want to \u2026 the question becomes how do you reach an audience?\u00a0 How do you \u2026 these are extraordinarily powerful stories that all three of you have documented.\u00a0 How do you convince people to take those very powerful stories seriously?<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 These are really good questions.\u00a0 And I think their answers are very \u2026 questions are complex and the answers would be complex as well.\u00a0 So I think you can dissect it to so many different aspects.\u00a0 But if I may, I agree with what your mother was saying.\u00a0 I think money should be put towards kids.\u00a0 I think money should be put towards ward seven and ward eight and should be put towards education and treatment and prevention.\u00a0 Because I think that’s how we can eliminate the later large rates of incarceration.\u00a0 And unfortunately majority of the people in Washington, DC who are incarcerated, come from the poorest socially, economically deprived wards. So I certainly agree that that’s –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 But remember this show goes out all throughout the country and all throughout the world.\u00a0 And that applies to any city not only in the United States, but any city in the world.<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 Absolutely right.\u00a0 But also again, just to use some numbers, we now \u2026 we’re so lucky to live in this country, we have so many advantages.\u00a0 But then you look around the world, and this is the country that has the highest incarceration in the world.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Yes, it is.<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 Why do we incarcerate, what is it, 740 people per 100,000 people?\u00a0 In Finland, I believe it’s 60 people per 100,000.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Huge difference.<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 So I think we have some homework to do here.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Want to reintroduce our guests, ladies and gentlemen.\u00a0 We’re doing a, as you well know, a piece on film and video on the subject of offender reentry.\u00a0 We have three experts in the studio with us today.\u00a0 Gabriela Bulisova, Greg Upwall, and Yavar Moghimi.\u00a0 Gabriela is an independent photographer instructor with the Corcoran College of Art and Design.\u00a0 The website is gabrielabulisova.photoshelter.com.\u00a0 Greg and Yavar are graduates of the George Washington University, the Institute of Documentary Filmmaking.\u00a0 They did an extraordinary film called Released to Life.\u00a0 It’s won three first place awards.\u00a0 You can see it on snagfilms.com, go to the website and search Released to Life.\u00a0 Or you can go directly to their website, releasedtolifeamovie.com. Gabriela, so we have the energy behind audio.\u00a0 We have the energy behind video.\u00a0 We have the energy behind stills.\u00a0 These are very powerful stories.\u00a0 Are they reaching the larger population, or are they just reaching the already converted to the topic?<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 We are independent filmmakers, photographers, so we can certainly use some help in terms of promoting our work.\u00a0 But that is my hope.\u00a0 If we \u2026 as you mentioned before, why should a population care about somebody who just came out of prison and is unemployed or homeless and so on?\u00a0 And to me feel like if I can just engage, even if it’s a small number of people into a dialogue about that people need second chance, that it\u2019s going to actually \u2026 that if we give somebody a job or ability to go to school and better their life, we’re going to improve public safety, community safety, create stronger families and so on. So is it reaching all the people?\u00a0 I would like it, not yet.\u00a0 I’m hopeful that it’s going to communicate to more people.\u00a0 But for example just this past Friday an exhibition opened in Anacostia at the Gallery at Vivid Solutions called Inside Outside, where people can come and see photographs, see the video, and hear the stories of the people that I worked with.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Greg and Yavar, you and I have sat and talked on a couple different occasions about reaching this mass audience.\u00a0 It is the contention of some people that unless we reach that mass audience, unless we move way beyond the already converted, the already convinced, unless we reach that audience we’re not going to make much difference.\u00a0 Again, the idea that 80% of offenders caught up in the prison system have histories of substance abuse, ten percent are getting drug treatment.\u00a0 There’s a gap that needs to be addressed.\u00a0 The only way that that’s going to be addressed is through political will and money.\u00a0 These sort of things cost money.\u00a0 To do that you’ve got to convince the larger audience.\u00a0 We’ve talked about public service announcements in terms of reaching a larger audience.\u00a0 Is that possible, is that doable?\u00a0 Do you think that we can appeal through art to the unconverted, to the general public, and convince them that this is a topic that they want to take on?<\/p>\n
Greg Upwall:\u00a0 Well I’ll jump in there.\u00a0 I think that again, the answer would be yes.\u00a0 And I think it is it in the way that that message, as Yavar said, it’s a question of storytelling.\u00a0 The real message is not, “Hey, you should care about criminals, and that should be something you think about when you wake up in the morning.”\u00a0 The message is more that I experienced individuals that were some of the most inspirational and driven individuals I’ve ever met in my life, that I’ve never met just in the general population.\u00a0 That told me something about the power of rehabilitation and truly \u2026 one of the guys in our film says, “I was in the news once for doing something wrong.\u00a0 I intend to be in the news again for doing something great.”<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 And that’s powerful.<\/p>\n
Greg Upwall:\u00a0 It’s powerful.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 These stories are powerful, powerful stories.\u00a0 When you sit \u2026 I’ve sat in prisons amongst 20, 30 offenders and we’ve had hour-long conversations about their lives, about their hopes, their dreams and what it is they want to do.\u00a0 Now statistically speaking, 50% are back in prison within three years.\u00a0 That’s a real problem.\u00a0 There’s not enough being done.\u00a0 So again, the outreach to the average person to convince them that this is something that is in their best interest.\u00a0 Is it from a standpoint of morality, Yavar?\u00a0 Is it from the standpoint of political correctness?\u00a0 Is it the standpoint of religion?\u00a0 Or is it from the standpoint of just it’s in your self-interest, it’s in your best interest from the standpoint of tax-paid dollars and your own safety, to support these sort of programs?\u00a0 What’s the message?<\/p>\n
Yavar Moghimi:\u00a0 Right.\u00a0 Each audience is going to have a different way that you can target them.\u00a0 But I do think to get the broadest appeal in terms of the message, I think a big part of it does have to come down to you feeling safe in your community.\u00a0 In one of our \u2026 Dwayne Betts, who’s one of the folks in our movie and he’s a Soros Justice Fellow, a previous ex-con who then is a poet and writer now.\u00a0 In our movie he talks about we know that we lock people away, but we don’t know what the product is that’s coming out of that.\u00a0 And I think that’s an important piece.\u00a0 We’re putting people away for crimes that they committed, and the assumption is that somehow they are being rehabilitated in the process.\u00a0 And if they’re coming out and they’re coming out safe for our communities.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Does anybody really believe they’re being rehabilitated in prison?\u00a0 The surveys that I’ve seen is that most people don’t know and most people don’t care.\u00a0 That’s part of the problem in terms of communicating.\u00a0 And we have three communicators who specialize in this topic.\u00a0 So tell me, is it that the public doesn’t care?\u00a0 Not that they’re callous human beings, but they have so many other things on their plates.\u00a0 Greg.<\/p>\n
Greg Upwall:\u00a0 I was going to say I think most people will sort of respond to the issue of their own safety and their family’s safety within their communities.\u00a0 And also the issue that this is something that their tax-payer dollars are paying for, the prison system.\u00a0 And we, time and time again, found individuals who had had access to educational training programs, books in prison.\u00a0 This isn’t to say they were on some sort of a holiday, or being served at luxuries.\u00a0 But the basic, you’re there, you’re serving time, what are you going to do while you’re there.\u00a0 And it became for us pretty clear that those who had had access to those things, certainly did better by them.\u00a0 And so it became a question of how do you use those incarceration dollars most effectively.<\/p>\n
Yavar Moghimi:\u00a0 Or even those that \u2026 and one of the centerpieces of our movie is the DC Central Kitchen which is a culinary job training program in the DC area.\u00a0 A lot of the folks they work with are ex-offenders.\u00a0 And to just see what they do, not only in terms of job training skills, but life skills, group therapy, substance abuse, they tackle a lot of the issues.\u00a0 And they have a very high success rate in terms of getting folks employed, keeping folks out of jail, keeping folks out of drug treatments.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 So all three of us agree they’re very, very powerful stories.\u00a0 All three of us agree to the ones who are successful, they are very interesting from a human interest point of view.\u00a0 All of us know that there are certain programs out there that can dramatically cut recidivism.\u00a0 I’ve got the three of you here.\u00a0 I’m going to keep hammering away.\u00a0 Gabriela, what’s the theme?\u00a0 Okay, now if we all know this, and we all understand this, and we all think wow, what a great topic from a journalistic point of view, from a human interest point of view, from a public safety point of view, from an effectiveness for your tax paid dollars point of view.\u00a0 What are we missing in terms of communicating that to the larger audience?\u00a0 There’s got to be a way.\u00a0 There’s got to be a way.<\/p>\n
Greg Upwall:\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 I will say that while we’ve gotten a lot of awards for our films, they tend to be student film festivals.\u00a0 I would quickly say that we haven’t reached a mainstream audience.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 How do you reach the mainstream audience?<\/p>\n
Greg Upwall:\u00a0 And I’m not sure we have the answer for that.\u00a0 But I do know that the messages that are being portrayed about the violence of prisons and things, that it is important, I think, to find ways to show the other side of that.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 How do we do that?<\/p>\n
Greg Upwall:\u00a0 And so maybe it is a public service announcement.\u00a0 Maybe a series of campaigns.\u00a0 I think it’s finding engaged people, like ourselves, that want to take on these topics in a sensitive manner with \u2026 that are looking at more than just the sort of sensationalized way of portraying things.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 But we all get together and talk to the converted.\u00a0 That’s my only problem with this issue.\u00a0 It’s not going out and talking to the person who lives 20 miles outside of the city.\u00a0 Look, this is an issue that has a profound impact on any city in the United States.\u00a0 It’s an issue that has a profound impact on any city in the world.\u00a0 The crime and justice issue.\u00a0 If we can take 50% of these individuals and provide them with the services and they stay out of the prison system, you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars saved.\u00a0 You’re talking about tens of thousands of crimes going uncommitted.\u00a0 You’re talking about something that is clearly what all of us want, yet \u2026 if I say cancer, people go, “How can I help?”\u00a0 If I say child abuse, people say, “How can I help?”<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 Right.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 If I say offender reentry, they go, “Well, what about the children?”<\/p>\n
Yavar Moghimi:\u00a0 This isn’t a problem that’s unique to criminal justice.\u00a0 I feel like there’s a tendency in general to put money in \u2026 and you think about healthcare.\u00a0 Spending money when people are already sick.\u00a0 Spending money when people need the emergency room as opposed to putting it up front for their preventative public health visits, you know, those types \u2026 this is a common sort of short-sightedness of a lot of bureaucratic processes where the money just isn’t put up front and it’s sort of an out of sight, out of mind mentality until all the people who are coming out of prison from the war on drugs are suddenly all back in society again.\u00a0 And what do we do with all these folks?\u00a0 I think there’s just a common problem of short-sightedness in general with a lot of these issues.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Well here’s a work assignment for six months from now.\u00a0 Because [Ph] we’re redo this show six months from now by the way.\u00a0 Because you guys are my guinea pigs.\u00a0 What is the theme?\u00a0 What is the central message that we can communicate to citizens in general to really say, “Hey, you know what, it’s probably in my best interest to support these sort of programs for people coming out of the prison system”?\u00a0 That’s going to be your homework assignment.\u00a0 So when we reconvene, you’re going to say, “Hey, I came up with successful themes.\u00a0 This is what we need to say.”\u00a0 Right?<\/p>\n
Greg Upwall:\u00a0 Sounds good.<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 Sure.<\/p>\n
Yavar Moghimi:\u00a0 Yeah.<\/p>\n
Gabriela Bulisova:\u00a0 If I may, I would just say that again the topic is so massive, so abstract.\u00a0 And I think all of us grew up with that notion of incarceration bad, prisoners bad, felons bad.\u00a0 So I think the topic is so stigmatized and the people are so stigmatized that it’s going to take some time to actually remove that stigma of incarceration.\u00a0 And I think that’s where we can come in as filmmakers, as artists.\u00a0 We might not have the answers, but perhaps we can at least start to engage people in a dialogue.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 People ask me why I was doing this radio show today.\u00a0 And I said, “Because we in the bureaucracy aren’t going to convince anybody.”\u00a0 I said, “That’s either going to come from the offenders themselves, or it’s going to come from the artist community.”\u00a0 They’re the ones who are going to figure this out.\u00a0 We’re not.\u00a0 We’re bureaucrats.\u00a0 We’re government bureaucrats.\u00a0 We’re not terribly creative, we’re overly cautious, we’re going to be pressed.\u00a0 And the answers going to come from the offender community itself or from the artist community, because they’re the ones who are going to tell us, “Hey, this is the direction we need to go in.”\u00a0 Am I being patronizing, or does that have a thread of truth to it?<\/p>\n
Yavar Moghimi:\u00a0 Well as you were talking about what are ways we can have this message heard, I think TV is so powerful in that way.\u00a0 And whether it is through a public service announcement \u2026 or I wonder how we could affect these shows that are sensationalizing being incarcerated.\u00a0 And realize that they’re having a damaging affect in society.\u00a0 Because I \u2026 there are –<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 But they’re not going to go away.<\/p>\n
Yavar Moghimi:\u00a0 They’re not going away, but there’s got to be a way to at least consult or have some sort of role in having a different message being told, too.\u00a0 And part of the internet and social media and things like that are also new, powerful tools to really spread that message too.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Thirty seconds.\u00a0 Is it powerful to counteract the cable news shows?\u00a0 Is social media powerful enough to counteract the bad news that comes out from the morning newspapers or from television coverage or from the cable shows?<\/p>\n
Greg Upwall:\u00a0 Well, whether it is or not, Leonard, my answer would be that that doesn’t mean we don’t keep pushing those messages.\u00a0 And I think that people do like positive messages at the end of the day.\u00a0 And we found some positive stories among these individuals.\u00a0 And those success stories need to be told.<\/p>\n
Len Sipes:\u00a0 Well we’re going to bring you all back at a certain point.\u00a0 We’re going to talk about those success stories.\u00a0 Because we’re going to come up with some sort of PSA and it’s going to go national and you’re all going to get awards and it’s going to be powerful and it’s going to be influential.\u00a0 I know that in my heart.\u00a0 In any event, ladies and gentlemen, our show today has been on film and video on offender reentry.\u00a0 We’ve had three guests with us today.\u00a0 And one I’m going to try for \u2026 wants to get her name correctly, Gabriela Bulisova.\u00a0 Greg Upwall, Yavar Moghimi.\u00a0 Gabriela is studying portrait photography, journalistic photography the Institute of Documentary \u2026 oh, I’m sorry, that’s Greg and Yavar.\u00a0 She’s an instructor to Corcoran College of Art and Design. Gabrielabulisova.photoshelter.com, it will be in the show notes.\u00a0 Greg and Yavar, they are graduates of the George Washington University Institute of Documentary Filmmaking.\u00a0 Again, they did the award-winning film Released to Life, which you can see on snagfilm.com.\u00a0 You’d go to SnagFilm and just search Released to Life, or go to Releasedtolifemovie.com.\u00a0 Ladies and gentlemen, this is DC Public Safety.\u00a0 We appreciate your interest and comments.\u00a0 And please have yourselves a very, very pleasant day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Http:\/\/media.csosa.gov Radio program at http:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/audio\/2012\/07\/film-video-artists-and-offender-reentry\/ Len Sipes:\u00a0 From the nation’s capital this is DC Public Safety.\u00a0 I’m your host Leonard Sipes.\u00a0 Today’s topic, ladies and gentlemen, is film and video on offender reentry.\u00a0 We have three people in the studio today, three experts, in terms of doing videos on the topic of offender reentry.\u00a0 We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,55],"tags":[146,144,147],"class_list":["post-921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reentry","category-social-media","tag-film","tag-offender-reentry","tag-video","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pBoKk-eR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=921"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":927,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921\/revisions\/927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.csosa.gov\/podcast\/transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}