The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is a non-fiction film about the prison in which we never see an actual penitentiary. A meditation on the prison’s disappearance in the era of mass incarceration, the film unfolds a cinematic journey through a series of ordinary places across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives: from a California mountainside where female prisoners fight the region’s raging wildfires, to a warehouse in the Bronx full of goods specially produced to meet the arcane regulations of the state correctional system, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs.