Everyday Injustice Podcast Episode 341 — Using Film to Reimagine Justice, Reentry and Public Safety

On this episode of Everyday Injustice, host David Greenwald speaks with Represent Justice ambassadors Kenneth Webb and Cesar Garcia about how their experiences with incarceration, education and advocacy shaped two films examining reentry, surveillance, community and the meaning of public safety. Webb created The Weaver in a Haystack, while Garcia created Stopcopticon, using different stories and artistic approaches to challenge how society views people impacted by the criminal legal system. Webb, a multidisciplinary artist who spent 16 years incarcerated after entering prison at 17, discusses how art became a path toward transformation and eventually filmmaking. His semi-autobiographical film explores the experience of returning to society after incarceration and the labels imposed on formerly incarcerated people, arguing that communities should invest in their success rather than create additional barriers to housing, employment, education and reintegration. Garcia, a Chicano activist focused on technology and social justice, examines a different dimension of the justice system: the growing use of surveillance technology by law enforcement. Drawing on his experiences growing up near the U.S.-Mexico border, incarceration and subsequent education and advocacy, Garcia questions the assumption that more police data, cameras and surveillance automatically produce safer communities and argues that people most affected by those technologies need a voice in deciding how they are used. Together, Webb and Garcia explore a broader question at the center of criminal justice reform: what communities choose to invest in when they talk about safety. Their conversation examines rehabilitation, education, mentorship, reentry, surveillance and the tendency to define people by institutional labels, while highlighting the potential of filmmaking to give system-impacted people the resources and platform to tell their own stories and imagine alternatives to punishment and exclusion.