The ZO

Back in May 2017, Vesla Weaver, a political scientist then teaching at Yale (now at Johns Hopkins) sent me a student project she thought deserved a wider audience. The thesis by senior Patrick Doolittle was called “‘The Zo’: Disorientation and Retaliatory Disorientation in American Prisons.”

“If I could give this essay an A+, I would,” she wrote. “Doolittle's essay is the most original, analytically complex, and most powerful essay I have advised over the years; I literally could not put it down.”

“The Zo,” prison jargon for The Twilight Zone, was based on a huge archive of letters compiled by the American Prison Writing Archive, a remarkable open-source database invented by Doran Larson, a professor of creative writing at Hamilton College. It is a disturbing study of a struggle between prisoners and their captors, waged not with fists or weapons but with deliberately disorienting rules and impossible tasks. Guards mess with the prisoner’s heads. Those incarcerated try to keep their grip on reality by clinging to details—days until parole, prices of items in the commissary, the minutiae of routine. Guards escalate, inflicting arbitrary transfers or random stints in isolation.

This was original and provocative work. But what was The Marshall Project going to do with a 96-page academic paper? As we thought about different ways of showing the experience of disorientation behind bars, we came up with a novel idea: turn it into an animated video.

First Look Media’s new streaming service Topic liked it—enough to option Patrick Doolittle’s essay and pitch the project to superstar artist Molly Crabapple. The actor Michael K. Williams, who works with justice-involved communities, signed on as the narrator, and the anecdotes, in the writers’ own words, were voiced by formerly incarcerated men and women. Several drafts and a lot of healthy creative friction later, we are proud to present The Zo. —Bill Keller