A recently-released documentary, “Milwaukee 53206: A Community Serves Time,” will be shown at 6:30 p.m. next Monday (Nov, 14) at the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library.
The hour-long documentary explores social issues that have helped to produce the highest incarceration rate in that Milwaukee area of any zip code in the United States. It tells the stories of three residents of the zip code to illustrate the daily effects of mass incarceration on both individuals and on the families that are part of larger communities, both in the 53206 zip code and elsewhere.
The program – which is free and open to the public – is sponsored by the Criminal Justice Reform team of JONAH (Joining Our Neighbors, Advancing Hope), a faith-based Chippewa Valley group concerned with social justice issues.
Following the screening, former residents of the area will help lead a panel discussion on actions that are being taken to revitalize this community. That discussion will also examine the causes that led a neighborhood adjacent to the 53206 zip code to erupt in riots last summer.
Susan Wolfgram, a local mental health professional and a member of the JONAH Criminal Justice Reform team, grew up in that area of Milwaukee and witnessed last summer’s unrest. She called it the tipping point of long-time neglect of the area.
“Historically, there haven’t been enough majority supporters in this state to care about revitalizing inner city Milwaukee,” she said
The documentary, coincidentally, was in production when violence flared up in Milwaukee in mid-August. The documentary makes the point that the 53206 zip code area is an entire community that is “serving time” as single parents and absent wage earners, amid a collapsing infrastructure.
According to the documentary’s website (www.milwaukee53206.com), the United States has the most prisoners of any nation in the world, both in raw numbers and by percentage of the total population. These numbers are “further compounded within Milwaukee’s mostly African-American 53206 zip code, where 62% of adult men have spent time in prison.”
Through its focus on the lives of three individuals, the documentary lets its audience “witness how incarceration has shaped their lives, their families and their communities,” according to the website. “These intimate stories reveal how a community fights to move forward even as a majority of its young men end up in prison. The film examines how decades of poverty, unemployment and a lack of opportunity (have) contributed to the crisis of mass incarceration in this community” and others nationwide.
Information about EXPO, whose members know the criminal justice system from the inside, can be found at www.facebook.com/expoeauclaire.