“When I come up here to teach every day, I have to check myself continually because at times I feel free.”  --Demar Nelson

In 2024, four years after the release of Gilda Sheppard’s documentary Since I Been Down, Kimonti Carter, the film’s protagonist, walked out of prison a free man. Yet as a member of the Black Prisoners’ Caucus (BPC) in Washington state, Carter founded and collectively developed a revolutionary educational project, TEACH (Taking Education and Creating History), powerfully committed to the possibility of liberation in the context of unfreedom. Initiated by the BPC but open to all, TEACH challenged Clallam Bay’s refusal to allow lifers a chance to enroll in classes. Starting with nothing but then realizing they had everything they needed, Carter and other lifers tapped into their own reservoirs of knowledge and life experiences, serving as both teachers and students. As the third film in Santa Cruz Black’s 2025 B.L.A.C.K. on Screen film series, Since I Been Down vivifies the praxis of abolition within but not confined by prison walls. To be down, as this film shows, is not just to be locked up but to bear the power of knowledge and transformation in ways that, in the words of a teacher/student, “transcends this cage.”