The Taft Documentary

For nearly a century, the state of Tennessee sent “wayward boys” to Taft, a reform school in a remote area of Appalachia. After hearing the stories of several men who had been at Taft as children, Ann Walker King, a criminal defense investigator working on a trial for a man on Tennessee’s death row who had been at Taft in the 1980s, set out to investigate.

The TAFT documentary investigates the accounts of mistreatment of youth who were institutionalized at juvenile detention centers and challenges us to question whether our treatment of youthful offenders is that much better today and advocate for juvenile justice reform.