As a videographer, I donate time pro bono to public defenders and other legal NGOs to produce sentencing mitigation films for low-income clients.

Our nation’s mass incarceration system routinely sentences people to long periods of time in prison – even when data suggests it doesn’t make us safer, save the government money, or help those in prison improve their lives. But what if individual documentaries could make a change in the length of those sentences?

Sentencing mitigation films are a new phenomenon but have a bright future in criminal justice reform. These films inject time into a process that is fast, and force judges and prosecutors to see the human in front of them. Another criminal justice advocate put it to me this way:

“Before we decide to put a human into a cage for X number of years, they should probably at least get a video.”