One Cop, One Inmate. One Question That Changed Everything.

The award winning If Project documentary follows a Seattle police officer and the transformative writing workshop she created with a group of inmates at a maximum-security women’s prison and documents their journey as they are released, reunited with their families and faced with life on the outside.

In the United States, there are over 6.8 million people in prison, in jail, on probation or parole. That is 1 in every 35 adults. Perhaps even more alarming is that women are the fastest growing segment of the incarcerated population, increasing at nearly double the rate of men since 1985.

In 2008, Seattle police officer Kim Bogucki walked through the gates of the Washington Corrections Center for Women, intent on asking a group of mothers for permission to work with their school-aged daughters in a Girl Scouts Beyond Bars troop for girls with incarcerated parents. On that day, Bogucki asked the mothers a critical question: “If there was something someone could have said or done that would have changed the path that led you here, what would it have been?”  The IF Project was born.