12th Street: Life Beyond Bars

MULTIPLE AWARD WINNER | 2021 international release, available worldwide excluding Australia and Croatia

Each year 25,000 inmates are released in Huntsville, Texas – one of the largest prison towns in America. Monday through Friday, the glass doors swing open on the front of the Civil War era, red brick prison. The inmates exit and shuffle along the sidewalk, some smiling , some pensive, all carrying onion sacks full of belongings. If their family are there to collect them, they leave into open arms. For most, they aren’t. The majority stream past the private homes and prison offices toward the Greyhound bus station three blocks away. For hours, until buses have carried them off, there are lines of released prisoners everywhere near the station: a line for bus tickets, a line to cash prison checks, a line to buy new clothes.

This is an honest, verité look at a day on 12th Street, Huntsville. As a range of prisoners and personalities leave life behind bars, they are given $50 and their bus ticket. Those now alone face a literal crossroads in their lives – the bus station to their left and the gas station to the right. According to one of the volunteers on the side-walk, that crossroads is everything. The bus station leads to an escape from the city they’ve just spent up to 19 years incarcerated in, and the chance of a new life – whereas the gas station in the other direction leads to $50 wasted on cigarettes and beer – a question mark over their futures, on the very day they got their freedom.

Anchored by Elroy, a wise, “seen it all” style guru who sits patiently, if somewhat sceptically, behind a desk in the general store they exit into, we meet the ex-convicts re-starting their lives, and their hopes for the future. We meet the volunteers there daily who cook pizza or restore dignity in precious, small ways – some give out free belts to help the baggy, lost-and-found clothes fit better, and blend in a little more. We also meet some of the families receiving their husbands and fathers home.

This documentary features a number of these newly released prisoners and explores one of the most critical issues in the national debate over criminal justice reform: the flood of prisoners returning to American communities without the guidance and support needed for a successful transition back to society. What awaits them on the outside? How are they prepared to deal the new world? Where do they go from here when they reach their first crossroad?