A five-year exploration of incarceration, family resilience, and the everyday moments that define life inside and beyond the prison walls.
Synopsis:
When two high performing athletes, scholars, community members and brothers from a small coastal town in Maine enter the federal prison system, their family is forced to confront both the rigidity of the justice system and how incarceration reshapes lives, relationships, and identity.
CRIMINAL follows Chris and Matt Hurley as they navigate federal prison, addiction, and reentry, witnessed and supported by their family. The film is told from filmmaker Leah Hurley’s perspective (Matt and Chris’ cousin), through intimate footage, phone calls, letters, and shared reflections. The audience experiences the shock of arrest, the emotional toll of sentencing, the standing still feeling of time apart and the process of reentry. They experience the frustration and confusion of navigating a system designed to isolate.
At its heart, CRIMINAL is a story of connection, responsibility, and rebirth. The film captures the surprising ways hardship can open doors to connection, resilience, and personal growth. It is both a family story and a lens on the human cost of incarceration in America, revealing the privileges that can soften incarceration and the universal challenges of powerlessness.
Impact Goals:
- Offer Americans, policymakers, and those without personal experience in prison an unfiltered view of the system’s impact.
- Illuminate how privilege can soften, but not erase, the trauma of incarceration.
- Spur conversations about justice reform, alternatives to incarceration, the link between addiction and incarceration, and the broader social and economic impacts of mass imprisonment.
- Humanize incarcerated individuals and people navigating addiction to challenge stigma and inspire empathy, dialogue, and systemic change.
Why This Film Now:
Mass incarceration touches millions of Americans and costs the nation billions each year. CRIMINAL provides a rare, deeply personal window into this system, revealing both its human and structural consequences. By supporting this project, funders help bring a story that is both universal and urgent to audiences nationwide — fostering empathy, driving dialogue, and catalyzing social and policy impact.
