Imagine a week behind bars. Imagine one day.
One day apart from your loved ones. One day without the open sky or natural light. One day without the freedom to be alone or the freedom to be among others.
Imagine the feeling that for the duration of your incarceration, be it for a decade or for one day, the world is going on without you, oblivious to your existence and impervious to your retraction from society.
One might assume that when the time comes to reenter the stream of life, you will be more than ready: ready to redeem past mistakes, ready to embrace all that had been withheld from you during your term.
Yet this is rarely the case.
In fact, up to two-thirds of newly released convicts will re-offend within their first three years on the outside and land right back where they started - if not worse.
“We are returning people to our communities broken and unprepared,” says Kathlyn Horan, director, writer, and producer of “The If Project.”
Horan, a 15-year veteran of independent documentary filmmaking, had not intended to devote eight years of her life to this project. Having made an initial foray into the world of a Seattle maximum-security women's prison, she soon found a story that would afford a rare chance to convey both the conditions inside a facility which many would be challenged to envision without benefit of films such as this one, and also to share a poignant and powerful interpersonal narrative tracking the lives of three inmates from inside prison to their respective journeys back into the world.
After eight years chronicling the story of a visionary local police officer who became the unlikely advocate of several incarcerated women, Horan combined her intimate footage and nuanced storytelling into a feature-length film that has garnered national attention and acclaim.
* * *
“Is there something someone could have said to you or done for you which would have altered your course?” The premise of the If Project, the program that serves as the name of the documentary, is an open invitation for inmates to write out responses to questions such as this one.
When Detective Kim Bogucki posed this question to one group of women, she was abashed by the floodgates she had opened.
The opportunity to reappraise and to express fears of being left behind, as well as the fears of reassimilation, proved to be a critically therapeutic exercise for a long-term inmate as well as for an inmate on the cusp of reentry.
The majority of the program participants were steeped in a background of abuse, drugs, neglect, and overwhelming poverty. The writing component of the project afforded these women a rare chance to consider the antecedents in their lives that contributed to their crimes and to envision a way back out into the daylight world where they wouldn't lapse back into old patterns.
Horan follows Bogucki and three project participants to the end of their sentences and then out into the world as they attempt to reclaim their lives.
“The If Project” is an inspiring story of unexpected alliances and also a trenchant reminder that there are creative ways that might stanch recidivism rates while making the lives of those incarcerated worth living.