Michael Jackson - They Don't Care About Us (Prison Version)

What this video is

Released in April 1996 as the fourth/fifth single from Michael Jackson's HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I (1995), the Prison Version music video emerged during a period of intense public controversy over the song's lyrics and amid widespread 1990s discourse on police brutality, mass incarceration, and systemic racism in America. By embedding Jackson's performance within a carceral space and interweaving…

Why it matters

A landmark intersection of pop spectacle and documentary activism, the Prison Version stands as one of the most politically explicit major-label music videos of the 1990s. It expanded the grammar of the form beyond performance clip or narrative short into agitprop essay film, deploying archival…

The director

Shelton Jackson 'Spike' Lee (born March 20, 1957, Atlanta, GA) is an American filmmaker, actor, and educator. He trained at Morehouse College and earned his MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He founded production company 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks.…