Prison Videos

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Welcome to The Prison Oracle Video Database, where we bring you outstanding videos about prisons.

NEW: 14th January 2023 – FOURTEEN DAYS IN MAY: There is just one entry on the police record of Edward Earl Johnson, a 26-year-old African-American man from Mississippi – murder of a police officer and attempted rape of a 68 year old woman. Sentenced to death, Fourteen Days in May is a countdown to Johnson’s execution as he battles in the courts for his life. This outstanding documentary reveals the effect on prison staff and other death-row inmates as time runs out for this young man – a young man who had never been in trouble with the police before, whose mother was a police officer and where the woman who he was alleged to have attempted to rape said he wasn’t the man – but he was convicted on the sole evidence of signing a confession he had never written.

Fourteen Days in May is a graphic illustration of a criminal justice system riddled with race, and it provides a crystal clear illustration of what is perhaps the ultimate of all hypocrisies where a Judge declares ‘You’ve killed someone and for that we’re going to murder you.”

Fourteen Days in May reveals the effects of an impending execution on prison staff and other death-row inmates as time runs out for this young man – warning: it contains graphic content of the gas chamber being tested prior to the execution with live rabbits.

The Database also contains the full eight episodes of “Strangeways” the 1979 award-winning series by Rex Bloomstein – and the series of programmes that caused one person watching it to join the Prison Service in 1982 determined to drive change, and who later became its Director General; Sir Martin Narey.

The shocking conditions revealed in this series, and the prophecy of one prisoner that one day the ‘roof of the prison will blow’ was to come true just a decade later when, in April 1990, Strangeways erupted in the longest prison riot in British history – the video database also carries a one hour video that looks at that riot 25 years after it ended from the perspective both of those who led the riot, and those prison officers who tried and failed for 25 days to quell it.

The Inquiry into the riot, The Woolf Report, is also available here.

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