Documentary Description

Prison Lullabies is the remarkable portrait of four women living on the bad side of luck, struggling with drug addiction, arrested for dealing and prostitution, and serving prison time with one common bond – arrested pregnant, Amy, Monique, Joann, and Anne Marie have all given birth behind bars For these women who are intimate terms with sexual abuse, poverty, and addiction, the Taconic Correctional Facility in New York State offers a rare gleam of hope. One of only five prisons in the U.S. to provide a nursery program for inmates, Taconic allows the women to keep their babies for the first 18 months of their lives while insisting that the mothers participate in a rigorous series of classes that range from basic child care to anger management and drug counseling.

Each woman is released in the course of filming. Each must choose, minute to minute, whether to find a job, break the cycle of relapse and re-arrest that has led to the loss of her other children, or pick up the crack pipe, abandon the child, and return to the streets
Shot in cinema-verité style, Prison Lullabies addresses these issues by allowing the audience the opportunity to observe and listen as the stories of the inmate mothers unfold in their own time and in their own words.

Prison Lullabies is an extraordinary tale – that of four women making life-altering choices and seizing the glimmer of possibility the prison nursery program is holding out for them and for the future of their children.