Broken On All Sides: Race, Mass Incarceration, & New Visions for Criminal Justice in the US

While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Eugene V. Debs Broken On All Sides: Race, Mass Incarceration, & New Visions for Criminal Justice in the US by John Leslie Broken On All Sides, a film by Philadelphia community activist Matthew Pillischer, is a powerful indictment of the prison industrial complex. The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population and incarcerates 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. But why is this? Institutionalized racism is at the root of the mass incarceration of millions in this country. Pillischer used interviews with academics, activists, religious communities, a former prisoner and a former Mayor of Philadelphia, John Street, to illustrate the origins of this set-up and how it operates.