Last Wednesday I went to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, New York State’s maximum security prison for women. Susan Purdy, a professor in Bedford’s revived college program, had asked me to show our film Deadline and speak about my experience as a woman working in the field of social justice and film. It was amazing, as most prison visits are in my experience.

The last time I was at Bedford Hills was in 1997, when there were no college credit classes available. Now, I was in a makeshift prison classroom with 12 students in green uniforms who were accumulating credits that would apply towards a bachelor’s. Many of them are serving life sentences and may never be released from prison, but that hasn’t stopped them from seeking a degree.

Susan and I had to enter the prison before the 5 p.m. “count” and then wait 90 minutes for the count to end and the women to be released from their cells and led to another building for class. They carried bookbags made out of clear plastic and several of them were young: the age of college students outside. One of them was wearing a raincoat which she joked was “contraband” — she was supposed to return it before count but hadn’t had a chance to before class.

I hadn’t seen Deadline in a long time — we completed this film over 3 years ago — and it was fascinating to sit at a school desk in a prison at sunset watching the reactions of the women in the room. You couldn’t have asked for a more attentive audience. They were completely engrossed — took lots of notes during the screening, and said “wow” or “uh-huh” out loud whenever something hit home for them, which was frequently.

After the screening they were clamoring to ask questions: what exactly does commutation mean? What was the exact wording of the Abraham Lincoln quote that Governor Ryan ended his speech with? Two of them had also recently taken a film class, so they asked me questions about who had conducted the interviews and who had done the camerawork. One woman, Roz, was eloquent in her appreciation of the film — she introduced herself by saying that she had been in prison for 27 years, since she was 17 — and had already gotten a college degree inside, but she was auditing Susan’s class and doing all the class work. She offered that she was not innocent of her crime — “I did it” — but that she had met a lot of people who were innocent and it was terrible to know that so many were in prison who hadn’t committed crimes.

Another young woman raised her hand to say that at one point in the film, when we end our interview with inmate Gabriel Solache with shots of the prison exterior, she glanced out the window of the “classroom” to see the spring green and the barbed wire fence outside and she said “I suddenly got a chill.” While women in prison were never the so-called target audience for Deadline it was great to see them enjoying it as a movie that spoke to something they all cared deeply about.