Two things really moved me in Michael Moore’s film Where To Invade Next. He visited prisons in Norway and interviewed inmates and staff. Prisons there are extremely humane. There is no capital punishment, no life sentences, and little or no rape and violence in the prisons. Each inmate has a cell with a door they can lock with a key.
When they get out, they have to be fit to live in society, and the prisons work toward that end.
In comparison, when you think about American prisons cheaply warehousing huge numbers of minority inmates, run by corporations for profit, providing cheap labor, allowing rape and violence to occur, it’s easy to see Michael Moore’s point that our prisons are a socially condoned, legal form of slavery.
The other moving thing was his visit to Germany to see how it deals with its history of Holocaust. Students learned empathy for a Jewish man who had to put the belongings he most cherished into one suitcase, because Nazis were forcing that onto him. The students then put their most cherished belongings into a suitcase. One by one, in went the cell phones, photos, keepsakes, etc. You could see it made a deep impression on them.
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