In Appalachia, the disappearance of the mining industry leads to a community hungry for employment, which it finds in prisons. In the Bronx, an ex-con breaks down the system’s backwards rules for care packages. Closer to home in St. Louis County, Black residents are caught up in a ludicrous maelstrom of endless tickets for trivial offenses. Brett Story’s stunning essay film travels around the United States, teasing out our country’s unhealthy addiction to mass incarceration, with some heartbreaking results (in one scene, a woman describes how an unsecured trash can lid led to a night in jail). Infuriating and surreal, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes lucidly reveals the prison-industrial complex as an alluring drug that America just can’t quit. (IK)