Friday, September 1, at 7pm “The Bail Trap” | Running time: 34 minutes | Post-screening Q&A with Geri Silva of Fair Chance Project at the Skid Row History Museum and Archive, 250 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90012.
Money bail is one of the main feeders of mass incarceration in the UnitedStates; yet it is something most Americans know very little about. Brave New Films has produced “The Bail Trap” series to change that. The money bail system is broken. Private companies make exorbitant profits by scavenging off of communities (primarily of color) living in poverty. Low-income Americans sit in jails for days, months, and even years for minor infractions simply because they can’t afford to pay high bond amounts. The reality is that 70 percent of people are in jail for one simple reason: being too poor. The videos in this series reveal how little most of us know about the reality of our bail system and how it affects everyday people even when they haven’t been convicted of a crime.
Post-screening Q&A with Geri Silva of Fair Chance Project
About Fair Chance Project
Fair Chance Project represents a movement led by liberated lifers (formerly incarcerated men and women), prisoners and loved ones of term to life prisoners organized around the demand for just sentencing laws and fair parole practices. Additionally, the group integrates formerly incarcerated men and women back into society enabling them to “give back and to help build strong, self-sustaining communities”.
Free movie screenings, free popcorn, free coffee & free conversation. Every 1st and 3rd Friday of the month, we screen movies about issues that are important to our Skid Row and downtown community at the #skidrowmuseum.
About Los Angeles Poverty Department
Currently celebrating its 32nd year, Los Angeles Poverty Department was the first ongoing arts initiative on Skid Row. LAPD creates performances and multidisciplinary artworks that connect the experience of people living in poverty to the social forces that shape their lives and communities. LAPD’s works express the realities, hopes, dreams, and rights of people who live and work in L.A.’s Skid Row. LAPD has created projects with communities throughout the US and in The Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Bolivia. LAPD’s Skid Row History Museum and Archive project is supported with funding from the Surdna Foundation.
About Skid Row History Museum and Archive
The Skid Row History Museum & Archive operates as an archive, exhibition, and performance and meeting space curated by LAPD. It foregrounds the distinctive artistic and historical consciousness of Skid Row, a 40-year-old social experiment. The Skid Row History Museum & Archive functions as a means for exploring the mechanics of displacement in an age of immense income inequality, by mining a neighborhood’s activist history and amplifying effective community strategies. Exhibitions focus on grassroots strategies that have preserved the neighborhood from successive threats of gentrification and displacement, to be studied for current adaptation and use.
