Nonureva Really Surprised!

Majorthebys Charming and brutal

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

troyez70 ... did they get a camera in that type of unit?!?! I've been locked up in lesser security jails and we couldn't get away with a freaking lighter, let alone a video camera! We were regularly used as practice for the local SWAT team to practice on, so contraband of any kind was confiscated quick! It seems unreal that these cons had all the electronic devices they did in the film - it made me think that this film was/is fake. And if someone smuggled that camera in, on/in their person via a body cavity, DAMN!!! The guy could pass a coffee can! That's insane! The film itself wasn't much of a documentary - when you only focus on one side of an issue it is more like propaganda.

mverobeach1 I thought this was going to be like Lockdown, but from an inmate's perspective. They show everything that Lockdown shows, but more boring and with a bunch of ideological commentary from the convict (he held up a cab with a sawed-off shotgun, then has the nerve to talk about morals and ethics) and his self-righteous mother. The people who made the movie are absolutely straining to make the events in the jail look illegal or look like abuse, but its exactly what one would expect prison to be like. And unlike lockup, which is raw footage of officers and inmates doing what they do, not aware that the footage will be aired on TV, this was NOT raw footage, because most of the time the inmates are inciting reaction from the officers just to give us a show. The only truth in the video was from those critical of Omar! Everyone else just looks ridiculous and unjustified. They talk about how Omar probably just thought he was going to make lots of money (not that it would matter because he would just blow in a matter of weeks after he got it anyway on cars and clothes and girlfriends). How this even made it to the Tribeca Film Festival is beyond me. If you watch this, you will not come away with any sympathy for the inmates, but the opposite. Not groundbreaking. Not original. Not interesting.

swd_ist I highly doubt this helped Mr Broadway's cause even a little bit. It was very obvious that the prisoners were "orchestrating" the events that occurred during the filming of this documentary. I did not see any real "abuse" in this film other than from the prisoners with the staged protests, it looked like the film was cut to show one side of the story and not the full process of cell extractions. In one aspect I do feel sorry for Mr Broadway in that he had lousy parents, especially the mother. She is probably worse than he is and watching her at the end was rather sad. If Mr Broadway had done this to show the abuses of the system theme and stuck with just that he would have gotten a lot more sympathy from people but it was very obvious that this was for the "money". Both him and his mother made it very clear throughout the entire video that it was for the money and not for the abuses, the abuse angle was just so it would get picked up by somebody. Hopefully one day he will get out of prison and turn away from the "gang" life and be a good example for his daughter. She still has a chance at a better life.

scottsmusic I really wanted to like this film, I'm all about righting injustice. But this is just some inmates with a camera trying to blackmail the system by documenting "abuses" on film. Guess what? It's PRISON! It's OZ! You get there by doing something so bad that a dozen random people agreed you need to be locked up*. Of course there's going to be abuses, of course there's corruption, it's PRISON. I didn't see anything there that moved me to feel there's earth shaking injustice to reveal, it's PRISON, not daycare. Skip this one and shame on you HBO for putting on this crap. If this was a nursing home it would be a compelling documentary but it just feels like a day of lockup to me. *I'm sure there are exceptions, but I think in most maximum security facilities if you are there, you did something very wrong.