Education
Northwestern Students Create Documentaries During Journalism Class Connecting Evanston Classroom With Prison Program
Students from Northwestern University’s participate in the Documenting Carceral Injustice Program at Stateville Correctional Center. (Credit: Northwestern University)
Once a week for a quarter, students from Northwestern University met in a prison.
The class, based out of the school’s Evanston campus, traveled to meet with students incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, where the two groups were tasked with collaborating on a documentary.
“Once that initial sort of ice was broken, I think the collaborations were incredible,” said Brent Huffman, director of the documentary journalism program at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. “Not that the documentary was secondary, but I think that relationship became really central to the class.”
The Documenting Carceral Injustice Program is part of the Northwestern Prison Education Program (NPEP). Through the program, 16 men became the first group of incarcerated men to receive a bachelor’s degree from a top 10 university in November 2023. Now that most men have been transferred out of Stateville, the classes are at Sheridan Correctional Center.
In the spring, students inside and out created five short documentaries over the course of 10 weeks. The documentaries highlight injustices within the criminal legal system using the stories of the men studying while incarcerated at Stateville, Huffman said.
The program is funded by a grant from the Buffet Institute for Global Affairs through a program created by Jennifer Lackey, the director of NPEP.
Two of the Stateville documentaries were recently nominated for Chicago/Midwest College Emmys: “Love, Karim” and “Defying the Odds.”
Daniela Lubezki, an Evanston-based student who graduated from Northwestern this year, participated in the class last spring. She remembers being alongside other students throwing out ideas for their film.
“We really would love to just get know you guys and start to understand your day to day, what brought you here and how you feel,” Lubezki said. “Conversations kind of were the driving force behind all of the documentaries that were made in that class.”
The students decided to highlight the story of Oliver Crawford, a Stateville-based student, who has been incarcerated for over 20 years for a crime he said he did not commit, Lubezki said. Northwestern’s Center on Wrongful Convictions has taken on his case, according to the film.
“Oliver” focuses on the impact Crawford’s incarceration has had on him and his family. He describes the difficulty of not being able to be at home for his daughter when she lost her mother to gun violence in 2017.
“I was supposed to be there, and I can’t be there, what do you do, you know? I couldn’t do nothing but just tell her hold on and keep saying I’ll be home, I’ll be home,” Crawford said in the film.
There were some logistical hurdles, Lubezki said. Stateville-based students were not able to use the camera equipment or have the technical ability to edit the documentaries and they were confined to one classroom to film.
“Oliver’s story kind of lined up perfectly in that sense, where he did have a lot of people on the outside that we could talk to, which, for visual purposes, definitely helped,” Lubezki said. “You don’t want to just be staring at one person talking for 20 minutes.”
Henry Roach, an Evanston-based student who graduated from Northwestern this year, also participated in the class last spring. He worked on “Grief Without Goodbyes,” about the impact of the separation between incarcerated students and their family outside. Part of the focus was the story of incarcerated student Scot Miller; while filming his father was hospitalized and he could only be supportive through phone calls.
“I am so tired of this place taking people from me,” Miller said in the film.
The participative nature of the class was valuable to Roach. It altered the dynamic of journalists and subjects, in that they were all in the class together, he added.
“Both having the perspective of the lived experience and collaborating with people who don’t have a lived experience who are working with you to record it, that just created such a ultimately stronger product,” Roach said.
Huffman said documentaries serve as a useful way to tap into emotional empathy with subjects in a way other media cannot. The films, he said, can connect with a wider audience to break harmful stereotypes around subjects.
That takeaway is in part why Lubezki said this was “by far the most meaningful course” during her time at Northwestern.
“The ability to go home at the end of the day was something that was really hard to grapple with at the beginning,” Lubezki said. “People are working so hard just to be a better version of themselves as an earlier version that they never had the opportunity to be.”
