Guardian’s latest documentary looks at how US prisons have become recruiting grounds for human traffickers
Image from The Trap documentary. Photograph: Alex Healey for the Guardian
The Trap: the deadly sex-trafficking cycle in American prisons
The Trap investigates how prisons and jails across the United States have become recruiting grounds for human traffickers, who are targeting incarcerated women and trafficking them out of correctional facilities and into pimp-controlled prostitution.
For the past 18 months, the Guardian has been investigating the role of the criminal justice system in feeding vulnerable women into America’s thriving domestic sex trafficking industry. With unique access in Florida, Massachusetts and Chicago, the film follows the stories of women caught in the trap of criminal exploitation and incarceration and those trying to stop some of America’s most vulnerable women from falling under the control of human traffickers.
The Trap: the deadly sex-trafficking cycle in American prisons
The film is part of a major investigation by Annie Kelly, an award-winning human rights journalist for the Guardian and Observer. She is editor of the Guardian’s Modern-day slavery in focus series
Documentary recommendations
At the cinema
There are some excellent one-off screenings coming up in the next couple of weeks.
The Rio Cinema is showing the wonderful Ex Libris as part of a national day of screenings about libraries on 15 July. I love this long observational film about the New York Public Library. They’ve also got a one-off event with The Shining Forwards and Backwards on 12 July, which looks for hidden meanings in the classic horror film.
Bertha DocHouse is showing Our New President on 1 July. Composed entirely of found footage, Maxim Pozdorovkin’s jaw-dropping fever-dream of a documentary tracks the 2016 US election through the lens of the Russian propaganda machine. I reviewed it in January. Also showing in July is Naila and The Uprising, the story of the Palestinian resistance leader Naila Ayesh, which offers a window into the history of a fierce, relentless and discerning network of Palestinian women who led a civil resistance movement during the first intifada in 1987.
The big national release in July is Whitney, the second Whitney Houston documentary in a year and, for me, the much better one. Officially approved by her family, it features some poignant revelations from those close to her.
Online
Watch Grenfell on iPlayer, the BBC’s meticulous feature-length documentary about the fire. It draws from hundreds of hours of interview, archive, social media content and observational footage to form a compelling, moving and lasting record of the events before, during and after the fire. It features intimate accounts from many of the men, women and children whose lives were forever intertwined and irrevocably changed that night – some of whom have never spoken publicly before.
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