About the Filmmakers
Brian Huston
Producer/Director
Brian Huston grew up in southern California and has been interested in filmmaking since childhood. Brian made his first film "Invasion of the Car People" while he was in the fifth grade. In college, he studied television production and business. He left college to work in film and began working as a production assistant in 1987 when he was 22 years old.
Since then, Brian has become a DGA 1st assistant director and has worked on commercials, feature films and documentaries. He has worked on national commercials for clients such as, Lexus, Coca Cola, Apple Computers, General Motors, and American Airlines.
In 1991 Brian founded Road Trip Productions, a documentary film company. He has produced and directed three documentary films and has received several film festival awards. Selections from his documentary "New Hope for Parkinsons Disease" were aired on ABC's "Primetime Live."
Brian currently resides in Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, California.
Adam Blank
Producer/Director
Adam was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Hampshire College, where he studied both the Philosophy of Language, Middle Eastern Politics, and Identity Politics.
After graduation he worked as a residential counselor for 'at-risk' youth. In 1995 he moved to Portland, Oregon where he worked with both autistic children and pregnant and parenting teenagers. He transitioned into documentary film with a position as a production supervisor with Lawrence Johnson Productions.
Adam moved into the commercial film industry, where he worked on a variety of commercials, industrials, and feature length films in various capacities including grip, script supervisor, editor, producer, and director.
In 1999, he relocated to New York City where he continued freelancing on commercials and documentaries. In 2000 he created his own company, Jigsaw Films, to pursue his interest in producing socially significant films.
There are over two million Americans in prison today. In every city and in every state across the country, a steady stream are released back into society--some 1,700 per day, nationwide. This is a movie about what they face and what it means for the rest of us.
From Prison To Home traces the experiences of four ex-inmates, and their parole officers, for a year after they are released from incarceration:
- Richard is a 36-year-old crack addict returning to his parents' home after 12 years of moving in and out of the system.
- Arthur, 45, has been arrested 13 times. After his most recent, 19-month stint, he's returning to a community where he's fathered seven children with five different women.
- Calvin, 49, has served 18 months for drug possession and burglary. He's trying to avoid returning to prison by living with his sister.
- At 37, Randy is emerging for the first time after serving a 16-year sentence for murder. He's intent on restarting his life by going to college.
From the outset, the odds facing these men are formidable: More than sixty percent of parolees are expected to be rearrested within three years.
In many ways these four are luckier than most. They are participants in a non-traditional parole program called the African American Program. Aimed at black men (who make up 45% of prisoners) the AAP begins nine months before release and attempts to address the wide variety of problems facing newly released convicts--from housing and jobs to addiction counseling and, perhaps most important, their sense of themselves as members of society.
And yet, for all the extra support provided by the AAP's dedicated parole officers, the men of From Prison to Home find themselves facing the same, powerful forces that shape the experience of other released prisoners: poverty, job discrimination, reintegration into the family, the tyranny of addiction.
What we learn as we watch each man's ups and downs, their dismaying setbacks and surprising small victories, is that there are no easy solutions to the problem of reentry and no easy definitions of success. And the question we're forced to ask, by the end of From Prison to Home, is whether all the tax dollars we are spending incarcerating these men are actually making us any safer.