The Wild Inside

Studio: TOPIC

Directed, Shot, and Edited by Andrew Michael Ellis

Produced by Shane Slattery Quintanilla

Sound Mix by Eli Cohn

MUSTANG. Derived from the Spanish mestengo—stray, wild, having no master, and from mostrenco—“obscure.” And so, out of the darkness, comes a herd of masterless strays, brought by the colonizers, left like a papertrail of conquest: 500 years of these living symbols, these galloping canvases, pacing over the plains and mountains, upon which Americans, indigenous and non-, have scribed their mythologies of the western pioneer, the warrior, the cowboy, the poet. Some contemporary land managers and agronomists would prefer to look past the symbolic aura of the mustang and see them as pests—as a non-native, invasive population. Currently 60,000 of these mustangs are held in permanent holding facilities by the Bureau of Land Management, and thousands continue to be rounded up and captured every year. In learning about this population we didn’t expect to find that their fate would so directly intersect with the fate of another population, a human one, that the state is also actively trying to “manage.” 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the U.S. and 6.9 million are under some sort of correctional supervision. With only 4.4 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. nonetheless holds 22 percent of the world’s total incarcerated people. Mass incarceration has become a particularly American story. Some American writers and thinkers have theorized this national penchant for imprisonment as the dark evolution of a country born out of colonization, genocide, and slavery. Meanwhile a popular mythology about America as a land of freedom persists, sustained in part by enduring symbols like the mustang and its wild frontier. To come to the grounds of the Florence, AZ Prison Complex and see real breathing creatures emerge out of the haze of the mythos we have woven around them, while simultaneously seeing real human men, with names and histories, emerge as individuals out of the dizzying but impersonal statistics around mass incarceration, and for both to meet there on those grounds, within that prison, was an experience we could never have imagined.