What DAUGHTERS Can’t Say

Prison documentaries rarely critique prison

Prison documentaries are often organized around a worthy program which is framed as a powerful tool for reforming prisoners and preventing recidivism. The critique of prison, much less the justice system, is generally implicit at best. The goal is to humanize prisoners and encourage viewers to empathize with them, hopefully building support for reform around the edges.

Daughters, directed by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton, does not bust that paradigm. The program it highlights is Patton’s “Daddy Daughter Dances”—a prom-like get together in which girls and teens get to dress up and spend a few hours with their incarcerated fathers. Patton started the program in Richmond, VA; the documentary chronicles the first dance in a Washington, DC facility.

The film focuses on four girls, ages 5 to 15. Aubrey, a 5-year-old, is a precocious bundle of joy and affection, who burbles cheerfully, and somewhat obsessively, about math and how long exactly it will take to see her father. The older girls are more aware of how much time long time is, and more wary and ambivalent about their relationships. Raziah, 15, has told her mother she has suicidal thoughts. Ja’Ana, who is 11, has been kept from even video visits by her mother; she doesn’t remember her father’s face, and is scared of the dance in part because she fears she and her father will not recognize each other.

The brief description can’t really do justice to how utterly emotionally devastating the film is. The father-daughter dance, where both fathers and daughters collapse into tears while trying to care for each other, is one of the saddest and most moving things I’ve seen on film.

It’s also, quietly, enraging. The documentary notes that many prisons have closed down in-person visits since 2014, substituting paid video chats or phone calls. Things have gotten even worse since Covid in 2020.

Really, though, the trend away from facilitating family visits has been decades in the making; the US abandoned rehabilitation as a goal in the Reagan era, and ever since efforts to connect incarcerated people to society or family have been grudging at best. Patton says on film that the sheriff at the jail was eager to facilitate the visits, but that’s not the standard approach. For the most part, the prison system sees visits, or any effort to treat prisoners as human beings, as a potentially costly distraction from the real business of warehousing and torture. That’s why, after her dance with her father, Aubrey doesn’t see him in person again for three brutal years.

The program has to work with those cruel presuppositions, and as a result it is arguably somewhat cruel itself. The men are required to take a ten week course on fatherhood before they can see their children.

The prisoners do seem to get something from the program; one man mentions he’s never really gotten to talk about his family or the pain of separation with anyone, ever. At the same time, the men have to be aware that they’re essentially being held hostage; if they don’t jump through the therapy hoop, they can’t see their daughters.

Those daughters, too, are affected by the bland disrespect of the institution; to get in to see their dads, they have to go through an x-ray screener. The father-daughter dance is beautiful and moving, but it exists within, and has to navigate, a coercive state which treats everyone who comes in touch with it—prisoners or otherwise—with dehumanizing condescension.

The film proudly notes the low recidivism rates for people who participate in the Daddy Daughter Dances. That’s no doubt intended as an argument not just for this program, but for a significant expansion of in person visits (including in-person visits where prisoners can actually hug and touch their family members.)

The advocacy here is important, and it seems likely to be effective in getting more funding for Daddy Daughter Dances— a laudable goal in itself. But how much change is possible without naming the thing that needs changing?

The prisoners all talk about how they will work on themselves and will reform themselves. But you only need to look around the daddy daughter dance briefly to figure out that, whatever they did or didn’t do, the men are incarcerated in no small part because they are Black.

One man does make a brief speech in which he notes that a system which systematically separates Black men from their families is not normal, just as slavery was not normal. It’s a powerful point, and one which deserves more than a passing mention. But programs like Daddy Daughter Dances are dependent on cooperation from wardens and prison officials; no one involved in these initiatives can critique the system directly, much less radically, without losing access.

I’ve seen some reviews of Daughters that refer to it as inspirational and impactful. That’s not wrong. At the same time, though the film, and documentaries like it, are a bleak reminder of just how powerful prison is, as an institution and an ideology. Even when faced with devastating, extensive evidence of its violence, cruelty, and injustice—even in a film about how some of its victims are completely innocent of any crime—we find it almost impossible to say that prison is wrong.