Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall

A 2014 nominee for Best Documentary (Short Subject), the HBO-aired Prison Terminal offers an end-of-life portrait of a convict. WWII vet and former POW George William “Jack” Hall served a life sentence for homicide in Iowa State Penitentiary, one of America's oldest maximum-security prisons. In recognition of an aging prison population, the institution now has its own hospice program. Long plagued by heart and lung issues (that have made him an infirmary-cellblock patient for 12 years), Hall says final goodbyes to old cronies, while his long-estranged son waits for the inevitable. Director Edgar Barens captures almost biblical imagery of the enfeebled old man still shackled in leg-irons for an emergency visit to an outside hospital. Little attention is paid to Hall's 1977 crime—supposedly the revenge-murder of a drug dealer who scarred his family—but viewers are told that Jack was a hard-drinking, racist hell-raiser in his younger days, who mellowed behind bars, converting to Catholicism and counting the mostly black (inmate) workers of the prison hospice as his best friends. A powerful portrait that touches on a wide range of issues, this is highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)