“Prisons are basically patriarchal institutions–they are set up for men,” says Brenda Webb, executive director of Chicago Filmmakers. “In some jails women get men’s shorts. They don’t get female underwear. Everything is oriented toward men.”
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Webb had been interested in prisons for a long time. “When I was an undergraduate in psychology I wanted to be a prison psychologist, because I was convinced that all prisoners were basically political prisoners. I was pretty idealistic.” While attending Indiana Central University in her hometown of Indianapolis, Webb worked as an intern at Indiana Boys School in nearby Plainfield. “One of my jobs was to sit there with a clipboard and a graph, and chart their behaviors in very concrete terms, like number of curse words. It was a disaster. The kids learned to manipulate us in five minutes.
Webb had wanted to do a screening program in part because she was disturbed by the steady diet of sexually violent images fed to women prisoners, from MTV to the latest shoot-em-up videos. She also thought a screening program would get her into the prisons, and later she might be able to teach the women filmmaking. She talked to officials at the Dwight and Dixon state prisons, who told her that an earlier screening program at Dwight hadn’t lasted very long. But to her surprise, they were quite interested in having her set up a program to train the women to use video equipment–using film was out because wardens think film splicers are a security risk.
