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> From: Tracy Huling <galgirls@francomm.com>
>
>
> Announcement
>
> My documentary film, YES, IN MY BACKYARD, examining the increasing
> dependence of rural America on prison industries, is coming to public
> television. Nationally released by American Public Broadcasting (APT) on
> November 6, 1999, local public television stations across the country
> will begin scheduling first local broadcasts between November, 1999 and
> March 2000. Because APT has no central "tracking mechanism", and
> because many stations have just received the program, I cannot provide
> you with a nation-wide list of when each station is broadcasting.
> However, I and others will be calling local stations beginning now to
> try and collect this information and then I will have it posted on the
> Independent Television Service (ITVS) website: www.itvs.org so you may
> check there (or contact me) for updates.
>
> Attached is a description of the documentary. I hope that the program
> will be used by prison activists and those concerned with rural
> development to raise public awareness about and catalyze discussion
> regarding the implications for both rural and inner-city populations of
> the use of prisons as economic development. I am available to lead
> post-screening discussions of the issues raised in the film and have
> done several of these already at universities and conferences.
>
> As well, as one result of doing the research for this documentary, I
> have become familiar with a range of topics about which there is little
> published research or written information. So, in addition to the
> documentary, I am now attempting to write about what I have learned. In
> April of this year, I completed a paper on some of these topics for the
> U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (to be published by them soon) and will
> be trying to do more writing about this in the near future.
>
> Please feel free to contact me at: galgirls@francomm.com for more
> information. In the meantime, here is the "official" description of the
> program.
>
> Tracy Huling
>
>
> YES, IN MY BACKYARD
> Produced and Directed By Tracy Huling
> Documentary, 1 hour
> National Public Television Release: November 6, 1999
> By American Public Television (check local listings for local broadcast
> dates
> and/or go to Independent Television Service website at www.itvs.org and
> check
> the YES, IN MY BACKYARD program information for local broadcast updates)
>
> ***********
> YES, IN MY BACKYARD offers important new information to communities
> struggling over the advantages and disadvantages of prison development, as
> well as powerful insights to those concerned with effective crime and drug
> policies, sustainable communities, preservation of rural culture,
> protection of the environment, prevention of violence, access to higher
> education and racism.
>
> The economic restructuring that began in America in the troubled decade of
> the 1980s has had dramatic social and economical consequences for rural
> communities and small towns. Together, the farm crises, factory closings,
> corporate downsizing, the shift to service-sector employment and the
> substitution of major regional and national chains for local, main-street
> businesses have triggered profound change in the heartland. The
> acquisition of prisons as a conscious economic development strategy for
> depressed rural communities and small towns has become widespread with the
> result that the majority of all prisons are now located in non-metro
> America.
>
> At the same time, the economic destabilization of inner-city communities,
> the national "war on drugs" and mandatory sentencing laws combined to
> produce unprecedented increases in U.S. prison populations and spending
> for new prisons, with the vast majority of those incarcerated being
> African-American and Latino men and women from inner-cities. The close
> ties of rural and urban America are perhaps nowhere better illustrated
> than in the increasing reliance of rural economies on prison industries.
>
> Through the eyes of one farming-community-turned-prison-town, YES, IN MY
> BACKYARD explores the increasing and multi-layered dependence of rural
> America on prison industries and subtly probes the profound implications
> of this dependence for both the keepers and the kept, and for our
> society's understanding of and response to crime.
>
> The first documentary of a prison town, YES, IN MY BACKYARD examines the
> small town of Coxsackie, New York in rural Greene County. Once a thriving
> farm community with a solid base of small manufacturing and a busy main
> street on the banks of the Hudson River, the community of Coxsackie now
> hosts two state prisons that are the largest employers in the county.
>
> Coxsackie Correctional Facility opened in 1935 as a reform school for
> wayward youth. Now a maximum security prison, Coxsackie houses over 1,000
> mostly African-American and Latino inmates from New York City. In 1983, a
> second, medium-security prison was built -- Greene Correctional Facility
> -- on land adjacent to the first. In 1997, a 200-bed addition was made to
> Greene and today the two prisons together house 3,000 mostly young, mostly
> minority men from the state's inner-city neighborhoods -- who comprise
> nearly half the town's population.
>
> YES, IN MY BACKYARD was produced by Galloping Girls Productions Inc. and
> WSKG Public Broadcasting, in association with the Independent Television
> Service and Eastern Educational Network. Partial funding for this program
> was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Contact Tracy
> Huling,
> tel: 518-634-2170/e-mail:galgirls@francomm.com for more information.
>
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