Documentary Voices is presented in conjunction with Linda Williams's course Documentary Film; she is professor in the Departments of Film and Media and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley

In the late fifties, Frederick Wiseman, then a professor of law, took his students to observe the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts. What they saw was a modern-day snake pit with dehumanized inmates offered little hope or dignity. Six years later Wiseman returned, this time with a 16mm camera. The result of his visit, Titicut Follies is a stark but compassionate look at the horrific conditions that persisted in the state-run institution. Among the inventory of indignities are decrepit men led naked to their cells while guards taunt them into fits of anger, and a young man whose complaint that incarceration is making his condition worse is met by flippant replies from staff psychiatrists. Representing the inmates, the state took Wiseman to court, charging that he had violated their wards' privacy. Not until twenty-four years later was the injunction overturned and the film allowed to be shown. Wiseman has maintained all along that “the privacy that was really invaded was the privacy of the state officials to run the place in the way it was run.”