STL Reentry Collective
Harvey Galler
The new project of STL Reentry Collective includes both the creation of a 1-1.5hr documentary film centering the narratives of 3 formerly incarcerated individuals who are reentering their communities or who have been living in them successfully and a subsequent public film screening and panel discussion about the reentry process focusing on why formerly incarcerated people are at such high risk for rearrest a decade out of prison.
The documentary will foreground the narratives of 3 individuals who are at the 1st, 5th, and 10th year marks of the reentry process. A Bureau of Justice Statistics 10-year follow-up study revealed that 61% of individuals they tracked after release were sent back to prison for a variety of reasons–a recidivism rate typically blamed on the individual choices of the formerly incarcerated. In documenting individuals’ reentry process into their respective communities, they hope to highlight individual strengths in this film while also exposing system-level gaps that often lead to reincarceration, poverty, poor health, and further stigmatization. The public screening event will include a panel discussion about the specific system-level gaps that emerge in the documentary and will offer actionable steps for individuals and organizations to support and advocate for system-impacted people in St. Louis and nationally.
Visit The STL Reentry Collective’s website below:
Past project: Our Time
Films and Workshops by Formerly Incarcerated Folk for Formerly Incarcerated Folk
Over the course of a year, the STL Reentry Collective will produce documentary film interviews of formerly incarcerated people in St. Louis and host public screenings and workshops that offer strategies to better support system-impacted people in the St. Louis community. This project – titled “Our Time” – will center the diverse narratives and experiences of formerly incarcerated people to ground local conversations about mass incarceration and reentry around those who have experienced it. Research consistently reports high recidivism rates nationwide, which mainstream narratives attribute to bad individual choices. Instead, these films and series of workshops will highlight individual strengths and expose system-level gaps that often lead to re-incarceration, poverty, poor health, and further stigmatization. The STL Reentry Collective is a volunteer coalition of formerly incarcerated people and allies founded in July, 2020.
Watch their documentary film interviews:
Visit The STL Reentry Collective’s Our Time page here. Follow them on Social Media: