The Farm: Angola, USA

Somewhere there may be prisoners getting coddled, but not at the Louisiana maximum-security state penitentiary known as "The Farm." As filmmakers Liz Garbus and Jonathan Stack point out in their eloquent, poetic, Oscar-nominated documentary The Farm: Angola, USA, 85 percent of those imprisoned there will never leave (perhaps more ominously, 77 percent of those imprisoned the year the film was shot were black).

The odds for the six inmates portrayed here don't look much better, and the suggestion is that though crime rates have plummeted, the penal system has mushroomed into a draconian monster out of Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo. In a parole hearing out of To Kill a Mockingbird, an inmate who has served 20 years of a 100-year rape sentence presents convincing evidence that the victims lied and weren't even attacked. He steps outside and the good-old-boy board members (one of them an African-American) contemptuously dismiss his plea.

Whether these are representative or model prisoners is unclear, but even a confessed killer on death row for 12 years seems to have paid his debt, rehabilitated himself, and then some. As one of the lifers, an old-timer dying of cancer, points out, there is life even in Angola, and the stoicism, faith, and good will these men seem to have achieved in their punishment is a reproach to those who take for granted their freedom.

-- Peter Keough