High Risk Offender (1998)

Director Barry Greenwald takes his camera into a place we never thought we'd see so intimately: a high-risk parole office and the people whose lives it touches--prisoners guilty of everything from murder to white-collar crime; officers desperate to keep their clients out of prison and their failures off the files. What you see on-screen is the real thing: raw, revealing and utterly fascinating. Over a 10-month period, we follow six high-risk offenders and the parole officers and therapists whose job is to make sure they stay clean, stay out of trouble and stay out of jail. The offenders put up with urine tests for drugs, random curfew checks and therapy sessions. Most work at it, some feel hopeless, others just go through the motions. Their stories are at turns bizarre, tragic, disturbing and endearing. Frightening and funny, sad and troubling, High Risk Offender is a stunning documentary.