“Being in this MF changed my life!” Barks Sabrina. She will be our narrator filled with anger and quick with the direct simple answer. The problem, however, is so very complex.

“Civil Brand” is a film I have been reading about for over a year. I checked my email and the director Emmy winner Neema Barnette emailed me about her movie over a year ago. Now that I’ve seen it, I can say it is a slick entertaining but angry yarn that knows how to make a point. While prison should be a hard environment, it should not be exploitive. And the fact that the United States might imprison more folks than any other country in the world has to make you shudder. This is a film about the abuses of privatization and presents a negative view of what might happen if corporate America gets control of the business of corrections. Yes, correction is a big business.

In “Civil Brand,” Frances Shepard (LisaRaye), Nikki Barnes (N’Bushe Wright), and Wet (Monica Calhoun) are incarcerated together with other young women in the Whitehead Correctional Institution for Women. I say young women because this highly stylized and symbolic prison is not really meant to be exactly like ones that actually exist. Having visited a few prisons, I can say that the inhabitants are not all attractive and not all young, however, the reality in our country is that more and more women end up there.

Anyway, the film gives us both good and bad inmates. Frances has allegedly killed her abusive husband and may be wrongfully imprisoned. Whereas, others are hardened repeat offenders like Nikki who has been in and out of prison twice already. We are spared some of the standard prison sequences in which the new girl is subjected to a great amount of fellow inmate abuse. One stabbing and a cat fight aside the prisoners pretty much get along with one another and even form a kind of alliance against the warden and specifically his henchman Captain Dease (Clifton Powell). The main storyline involves the privatization of a prison in which the inmates are forced to work in a sweatshop for slave wages. The conditions are awful and it takes a Norma Rae-type strike to bring things to an initial halt.

“Civil Brand” knows its limitations. This is neither “The Shawshank Redemption” nor “Cool Hand Luke” or “Caged Heat” for that matter. Like “The Magdalene Sisters” that came out earlier this year, dramatic license had to be taken. And like “Magdalene” the issue is seriously addressed. For example, although there is one long sequence in which Frances and Nikki are stuck in the hole wearing nothing but their underwear, at no time does it seem akin to a sexploitation film (ala “Caged Heat” perhaps). I liked the way the characters reacted to their situation, no one was too smart or too over the top. Instead, the film’s conclusion works the same way “Set it Off” left you impacted and at one point watching “Brand,” I remembered that terrific scene in “New Jack City” when Pookie (Chris Rock) called out for help.

The performances are solid. Everyone involved has accepted their particular role no matter how unappealing they may appear. LisaRaye and N’Bushe Wright standout among the cast of hip-hoppers which include a nice low toned performance by Mos Def as a college boy prison guard and DaBrat as our irreverent narrator. Gratuitous use of explicatives roll from the performers mouths so naturally that one is not surprised that some of them are rappers (please forgive me here but my experience with rap involves the artful use of hard words and an even more artful coupling of such words). This time, however, we don’t have to suffer through a movie about black diamonds and Jet Li doesn’t make an appearance with a roaring fire in the background.

Frankly, this is light years ahead of anything hip-hop’s produced in the last few years. We even get an outstanding soundtrack that fits the film well. I suspect that it took a real pro like Barnette to make a serious film that makes maximum use out of hip-hop performers. The direction here is very good; the film movies along briskly and the flair for what might be a jump cut or two is a better than anything airlifted from the music video world.

Reading the press materials on “Civil Brand” I wondered whether the DVD release will include a documentary about the growing women prison population. According to the statistics cited therein, by the end of 1998, US prisons held 1,217,592 men to just 84,427 women. With the number of women inmates on the rise, one would think that reform is a good idea. Films like “Civil Brand” can only help the cause.

Jonathan W. Hickman, 2003