THROUGH the portraits of six men, filmmakers Stack and Garbus document the horizon of expectation for inmates of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Despite one prisoner's claim that "life isn't over when you enter Angola", the limited prospect of release means that, according to the head warden, 85% of the 5,000 prisoners will finish their lives behind bars.

Four of the six prisoners profiled are African American. The terrible irony of Angola - it was a former slave plantation turned into a prison at the end of the American Civil War, named after the country in Africa from which most of the slaves came - is underscored by the attention given to race issues. In one of the few directorial interjections, we learn that 77% of new inmates in 1997 were African American. The documentary mainly lets the prison and its population speak for themselves, which leaves the viewer to draw her own conclusions about the system. Even the head warden is given quite a bit of airtime to speak flatteringly of the business he runs - Angola is a multi-million-dollar farm that employs the prisoners on a wage scale of 4 to 20 cents an hour.

There is an undeniable air of whitewashing to some of the footage, though how much of this is due to restrictions set in place by prison officials is uncertain. The six men appear to be a model prisoners. Even the death row prisoner who is executed in the course of the film makes no fuss over his fate. There is no other explicit violence, or mention of prison employees abusing their power. Only in one key scene does the facade break down: the parole board debating one of the African American prisoners' cases skips over the evidence in a clearly foreordained manner before recalling the presence of the camera. This scene bears the burden of contextualizing much of the rest of the footage. Despite the tales of self-improvement, most of these men hope for the one thing they will never have: freedom.