The Story

There is no road map for coming home from prison. Freedom can take time and there are obstacles, including the tangled labyrinth of probation and parole supervision. Nonetheless, it’s possible to return home and remain free. ...and this is what drives the film’s protagonists.

 

Roland Whitley was the star of his high school football team but couldn’t read or write when he graduated. Tiheba Bain was a young working mother with two small children when she went to prison and shortly after her release she founded the organization Women Against Mass Incarceration. ...And Louis Reed, although he stumbled and got rearrested, has now found a path to the national stage seeking to reform probation and parole laws which are the biggest drivers of reincarnation.

 

When Does Freedom Begin is about ordinary people, leading the fight for empathy, reform and freedom. It’s a crash course in activism as the protagonists illustrate how to make a movement, exploring the impact of prison on families and children, probation and parole as drivers to mass incarceration, the difficulty of reentry, and the importance of freedom, love and forgiveness.

 

Since the early 1990’s the largest city in the state of Connecticut has been a place of over-incarceration, where many people have a family member, friend or neighbor who’s been to prison. And it’s not just the men. Women are the fastest growing population in the prison system today and eventually, most of those loved ones will come back to the city. That’s when the healing and the rebuilding really begins.