After 25 years in prison, Brandon Jackson is fighting the last of Louisiana’s Jim Crow laws.
In 1997, Brandon Jackson was convicted of a crime he said he did not commit. He was robbed of $6,500 from an Applebee’s restaurant outside Shreveport, Louisiana. He said no one was injured. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime.
At trial, two jurors found him not guilty. In 48 states, there would have been a mistrial and he might have gone free, but Louisiana’s Jim Crow-era laws designed to lock up black defendants allowed for a unanimous jury conviction. Jackson was sentenced to life in prison.
The sentencing begins just days after Brandon Jackson was released on parole after 25 years in prison. The film follows Jackson as he grapples with agoraphobia, paranoia, and alienation resulting from 25 years of unjust incarceration.
The menial work he was able to do evokes memories of slavery-like conditions at Louisiana’s infamous plantation prison. He’s fighting a parole system that demands more than $11,000 in fees and sends officers home before dawn. He concludes that he is “free, but not free.”
Over time, he finds community in a support group for formerly incarcerated people and a sense of purpose in advocating to overturn Louisiana’s last Jim Crow law.
<컨빅션>is the story of one man’s quest to adjust to life on the outside and help the more than 1,500 people he left behind after Jim Crow left him in prison after unanimously convicting him.
