Solitary

Red Onion State Prison sits in rural Virginia, three hundred miles from the nearest city. It is one of more than forty supermax prisons in the United States, and it holds men in eight by ten foot cells for twenty three hours a day. Kristi Jacobson filmed there over the course of a year, and what she brings back is both what the men in isolation say and what the corrections officers say, since they are doing a kind of time alongside them. The prisoners describe how they got there and what it takes to hold on to their minds. The film played at Tribeca in 2016 and went out on HBO that December.