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Home / Lifestyle

TV: Hope from behind bars

7 Sep, 2000 06:01 AM3 mins to read

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By LOUISA CLEAVE

Grandmotherly Mary Reilly does needlework and says she has learned to control the rage which caused her to shoot her husband and stab a woman to death.

She is one of the 900-plus women living in the Louisiana state prison that is the setting for tonight's documentary The Friday
Files: 900 Women (TV3, 8.30).

The Susan Sarandon-narrated journey inside the wire-topped walls has been billed as the real-life Bad Girls, referring to TV One's popular dramatised series about the lives behind bars in a British female prison.

Unfortunately, there is no evidence of a Bad Girls "bodybags"-style prison officer nor a nasty Shell Dockley type, but the documentary portrays plenty of emotion in its straightforward look at the fastest growing prison population in the United States.

The faces behind the bars are more often crying than scowling, an expression you might expect from the convicted murderers, drug offenders and thieves chosen to be interviewed for the documentary.

Many of the women's stories are short on bitterness and full of hope for the future. Not many are keen to dwell on the crimes that brought them to the prison, and it is clear the programme prefers to take viewers inside prison life rather than to shock them with an insight into its inmates' minds.

Reilly is the only prisoner who reveals the details of the crimes which led to a sentence of 68 years. She has served 23 years.

Her husband had beaten her for making a lunch he did not want. After forcing Reilly's head through a fridge door he told her to make what he wanted to eat.

"I said 'No.' I got my gun out from under the pillow and shot him right there."

The softer side of Reilly - and the enormity of her sentence - comes through when she approaches the prison warden about allocating some prison land for a cemetery.

"I found love here and I would want and hope the people who love me could have a closure when I pass away, and I would hope it was the people who love me that would care for my grave," she says.

Reilly was also the instigator of family Christmas days, with decorations in the prison grounds and a Father Christmas distributing gifts to the prisoners' children.

The most moving of the stories told in this documentary is Keanna's, a former heroin addict and the mother of three children who are all waiting for the day she is released.

The programme switches between Keanna's battle to clean up and turn her life around and her tough-love mother looking after her kids on the outside.

When the documentary starts looking too fluffy it takes a sharp turn back to reality. It introduces Antoinette Frank, a former police officer and the prison's only inmate on death row. In 1994 she murdered an off-duty cop and two other people in a botched restaurant robbery.

Again we see more optimism.

"Sometimes I do get frightful, especially when I see the news and realise a person is getting executed.

"I have so much faith in God. I try not to ponder that and cry about the situation. I have to wait patiently for the outcome."

According to 1998 figures, the majority of America's female inmates - approximately 1.2 million - are non-violent offenders who have alcohol, drug and mental health problems.

Fewer than 10 per cent are receiving treatment in prison and 95 per cent are victims of abuse.

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