Don't Be Afraid To Humanize Criminals - 'Sing Sing' as the Quintessential Prison Film

An essay on our approach to criminals and what we can learn from Sing Sing (spoiler-free!)

"I can't believe he humanized such an awful person." Several classmates of mine in grad school shared this sentiment about Pedro Almodóvar’s portrayal of an abuser in his film Bad Education: he showed a tear rolling down his cheek. Mind you, these were leftist classmates, very much against America's criminal justice system, some even to the point of being prison abolitionists, given the cruel treatment that inmates have in this country. It should follow, then, that they consider criminals human beings, so what's up with this discomfort when their human side is shown in fiction?

It is with this thought in mind that I always approach films about inmates. Is the filmmaker portraying these characters as people instead of monsters, animals, or aliens? How does the execution serve this portrayal?

Greg Kwedar's Sing Sing (2023) did an exemplary job. It is probably not the first time you'll see a story where inmates learn drama. Orange Is the New Black, one of Netflix's most-watched original shows, had several of its characters both acting and writing plays in a drama club, and nowadays these programs are being executed all over the world thanks to their rehabilitative and socio-emotional benefits in inmates. In the Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison, the program was called Rehabilitation Through the Arts. They usually did Shakespearean tragedies, but this time they voted to do a lighthearted, zany comedy.

Sing Sing excelled in its attempt to re-humanize inmates, not just in the eyes of us, the audience, but also in their own eyes. The first element that I commend is that Kwedar never reveals what crimes any inmate committed. It's a classic in every prison story for characters to ask one another "What are you here for?" or something else along those lines, usually right after meeting for the first time. Maybe it's like that in prison in real life, but that doesn't mean it should be like that in fiction too. I like how writer James Scott Bell puts it: “Fiction is not reality! Fiction is the stylized rendition of reality for emotional effect.” Writers twist reality, always, no matter how realistic their fiction is, to get a message, a feeling, or an experience across. So, if your message is that inmates are human beings, it makes perfect sense to leave out their crimes. Is one of them incarcerated for theft? Murder? Sexual assault? Maybe one of them even committed the horrible acts that that villainous character in Almodóvar's Bad Education did. We'll never know, and I'm happy we won't.

Bryan Stevenson, the famous lawyer and social justice activist whose work defending inmates is portrayed in the film Just Mercy, has a quote he says in every one of his conferences: "Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done." Their worst actions are something these inmates will have to live with for the rest of their lives, but what would be the need for the audience to know? So that we can say "Oh, look at how this murderer is acting as Hamlet in drama club," or "Look at how this sex offender is now playing a pirate in a comedy" …and?

By ignoring their crimes, they are all placed as equals before our eyes, and that is one of the reasons why that program means so much to them. Prisons are full of hierarchies, many times due to the toughness of the inmates, and that toughness is usually defined by their crimes. You know you won't mess with the guy who killed ten men, but you probably will with the guy who's there for tax fraud.

The fact that their crimes are hidden from us, the audience, also makes the case that this is not brought up in the program, either. It is a space for them to grow, to have fun, to feel, so it follows that they don't bring up each other’s crimes.

The second element that I commend is their take on identity. There is a scene in which Divine Eye, the newest addition to the club, tells Divine G how scared he is about his sentence ending and going back to the real world. He says something along the lines of "I'm a gangster and will keep being a gangster once I'm out." (once it's out in VOD I'll rewatch it and write it here verbatim). He believes his identity is set in stone and that after getting out, he will still be a man who again and again does "the worst thing", as Bryan Stevenson would put it. This scene is crucial to the story and its themes. Our identities can trap us, more specifically, our beliefs in what our identities are. Like Oscar Wilde said in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, "To define is to limit". If attaching oneself to things as small as our professions can be limiting, imagine how it would be to attach oneself to "the worst thing we've ever done". So, of course, they are learning acting: Putting on costumes, playing a king, a pirate, a Pharaoh. Isn't acting about letting yourself go and becoming someone else, at least for the duration of the performance (considering you're not doing some extreme method acting)? These men constantly learned to be someone else, and to acknowledge how easy it can be to let go of your past self. Of course, other benefits to being part of this club are shown in the film, such as emotional management during meditation, but these are all in the service of its main purpose: you can change. Your identity is a lie.

This is something that might be old news to Buddhists. Attachment is suffering, taught the Buddha, and attachment to one's identity is a reason why we suffer. Believing I am a sad person, a dumb person, a mother, a wife, a thief, a criminal... Even if that identity is centered around a positive trait (I am a happy person, a successful person, a smart person...) it is still limiting and stagnant, it blocks the way of change. It is even more moving when we realize that these actors are the inmates playing themselves, so this act of unattachment to their identities is still very much alive for them. It's like they're telling us, "That used to be me, but not anymore." This is why the Buddha taught that there is no "self", no "I", and understanding this, for him, is the path to liberation.

Back to my classmates’ complaint about “humanizing” an “awful person”, I praise artists that are not afraid to do so. Exploring their vulnerabilities is, after all, something that will end up benefiting us all as a society.

"Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him," said Fyodor Dostoevsky, a huge authority on understanding the mind of evildoers. This man got into the head of a murderer when he wrote Crime and Punishment. But many writers are afraid of doing so. In The Hollywood Reporter's 2019 Writers Roundtable, Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth talks about how he has declined three offers for a movie about Hitler. "I felt like I was gonna humanize him," he says. It is not my intention to compare the men in this film to Hitler, but to raise the question of why we keep insisting on seeing certain people as a different species, as “not humans”. Roth goes on to say that he then watched the 2004 film Downfall (Der Untergang), which made him realize he had been wrong from the start. “He can be human, but also be the type of human being that shows all sorts of dimensions,” Roth says.

It is a hard pill to swallow to realize that the worst mass murderers, terrorists, and sadists in history were once babies, and that something happened along the way: propaganda, indoctrination, abuse, and in the case of the Nazis, a lot of methamphetamine to make them more aggressive. If we don't swallow this pill and recognize that these evildoers are, in fact, human beings, how can we prevent the next generations from committing these atrocities? Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke took on a big challenge when making The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band), a film that showed how German children in the 1910s were indoctrinated to later become killers. Haneke did not show any signs of psychopathy in them, such as running around torturing animals for fun. What's chilling about this film is that these are ordinary kids whose situation pushed the worst out of them. If this could happen to ordinary kids in Germany, or today in the ISIS recruitments, it could have happened to me, had my environment been different, or it could happen to my (hypothetical) children. That is chilling. “A visible psychopath is reassuring to the viewer,” Haneke said in a documentary about his life and work, “because a viewer can say, he's a psychopath, and psychopaths are pretty rare, thank God. The chance of my identifying with a situation in which a borderline figure appears is relatively slim. The disquiet is greater if it’s a next-door neighbor.”

If I'm going off on a tangent, it's because this is why I stand by the re-humanization of people who do horrible things. We’d be burying our heads in the sand if we closed our eyes to their humanity, or just want to pretend like they are just rare psychopaths without any cure. If we ignore their humanity, we will never know how to improve as a society.

I watch a lot of true crime channels on YouTube. I’ve found multiple complaints in the comments when the YouTuber shares the tragic backstory of criminals. “You’re excusing their behavior,” is a common one. Again, and again these YouTubers have to take the time in their videos to make it clear that explaining a behavior, or even understanding it, is not excusing nor condoning it. I find the same criticisms even for white-collar crimes, such as for David Fincher’s The Social Network and how dare he make us feel empathy for a monster like Mark Zuckerberg.  

So, the phrase "I can't believe they humanized such an awful person" creates a short circuit in my brain. What do you mean a writer "humanized" a "person"? Aren't "human" and "person" synonyms? I understand the use of the verb "to humanize" if we're talking about an animal or an object, but if we're talking about a person, it feels like tautology. The opposite is true, though. We dehumanize criminals, which is why I've used the verb "to re-humanize" here, when talking about the labor of Sing Sing, instead of the verb "to humanize".

Now, Dostoyevsky hit us with another thought-provoking quote on the subject: "A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals." I see memes all around the internet that mock how "luxurious" Norwegian prisons are, but I wonder if their authors know that Norway has the lowest recidivism¹ rates in the world (only 20% of former inmates are imprisoned again in the future), compared to America's (60%, among the highest in the world!), where prisons are precarious and brutal?² A society should be judged by how it treats its criminals because it means that it is committed to real change and to peace, as it recognizes how the human mind works.³The recidivism rate among former inmates of Norwegian prisons is nearly 50% lower than among offenders sentenced to community service or made to pay a fine.⁴ “It’s really very simple,” says Bastøy Penitentiary’s warden, Tom Eberhardt. “Treat people like dirt, and they’ll be dirt. Treat them like human beings, and they’ll act like human beings.”⁵

Not only we can make sure future generations don't commit crimes if we understand them, we also ensure a safer space for all citizens if we look at the science: if we focus on rehabilitation, former inmates won't recidivate. Instead, they will have jobs and become productive members of society.⁶ If we focus on punishment, the vicious cycle will keep going. “I tell people, we’re releasing neighbors every year,” says Eberhardt. “Do you want to release them as ticking time bombs?”

Back to my peers in grad school, I’m sure they know this. I’m sure this is why they are so passionate about prison reform. Yet there is still an uneasiness whenever we show the vulnerable side of a human being who has behaved immorally. Then again, I have never met a person free of contradictions. I guess we must keep having these conversations to keep finding our own personal “out-of-character” moments. I’m glad films like Sing Sing are putting these topics on the table.

Finally, a pet peeve:

I'm gonna be a pain in the butt here, but it is for the sake of the argument. I commend writers who want to re-humanize inmates. But an all-too-common trope I find in prison stories is the 'wrongfully incarcerated' inmate. This is usually the protagonist who has the role of hero or savior for the rest of the inmates, who usually are guilty. Take The Shawshank Redemption, for example. The film focuses on the wrongfully incarcerated Andy Dufresne, who, in his many years at Shawshank State Prison, changes the lives of the rest of the inmates for the better. If one's point is to show the humanity in criminals, it would make more sense for the protagonists to be guilty of their crimes and then have a redemption arc. This is something that happens again in Sing Sing. Devine G, our protagonist, is a wrongfully incarcerated man, and a mentor and role model to his peers, whether for his exceptional acting and writing skills or for his emotional intelligence. However, I can pass it over in this case because Domingo is playing a real person, so it is logical to honor his real story.⁷

I’ll see my way out with a poem that I kept in mind while writing this piece. Here’s my attempt at translating the poem Considerando en frío, imparcialmente by Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938)

Considering coldly, impartially,

that man is sad, coughs, and yet,

he delights in his ruddy chest;

that all he does is piece together

his days;

that he is a gloomy mammal and combs his hair...

Considering

that man softly emerges from his work

and echoes as a boss, sounds as a subordinate;

that the diagram of time

is a constant diorama in his medals

and, half-open, his eyes studied,

since distant times,

his famished formula of mass...

Understanding effortlessly

that man sometimes stays thinking,

as if wanting to cry,

and, subject to lying down like an object,

he becomes a good carpenter, sweats, kills,

and then sings, eats lunch, buttons himself up...

Also considering

that man is indeed an animal

and yet, when he turns around, he hits me on the head with his sadness...

Examining, finally,

his disparate parts, his toilet,

his despair, at the end of his atrocious day, erasing it...

Understanding

that he knows I love him,

that I hate him affectionately and that, in short, he is indifferent to me...

Considering his general documents

and looking through glasses at that certificate

that proves he was born very small...

I gesture to him,

he comes,

and I give him an embrace, moved.

What does it matter! Moved... Moved...

Now please go watch Sing Sing in your local theater if you haven’t yet!

1. Recidivism: a person's relapse into criminal behavior, often after the person receives sanctions or undergoes intervention for a previous crime

2. Berger ‘Kriminalomsorgen: A Look at the World’s Most Humane Prison System in Norway’, p. 20

3. If you find this topic as interesting as I do, I have to recommend the book Humankind by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman before this article is over. It examines our beliefs on humanity being inherently evil and explores how people are pushed to get to the point of becoming Nazis, terrorists, or just to pull the trigger on one person, while also debunking major psychological experiments that shape our legislation even to this day.  

4. Manudeep Bhuller et al., ‘Incarceration, Recidivism, and Employment’, Institute of Labor Economics (June 2018)

5. Quoted in Baz Dreizinger, ‘Norway Proves That Treating Prison Inmates As Human Beings Actually Works, Huffington Post (8 March 2016).

6. The “but my tax money!” crowd is always the first one to criticize these measures. While it is true that a stay in a Norwegian prison costs on average almost twice as much as America’s ($60,151 per conviction), they save their law enforcement $71,226 apiece, because ex-convicts commit fewer crimes. Also, as more of them find jobs and don’t need government assistance (plus, they pay taxes), they save the government another $67,086 (Manudeep Bhuller et al.). Finally, as Rutger Bregman explains in his book Humankind, you can’t put a price on having fewer victims in your country.

7. That’s another point in favor of Orange Is the New Black. All the inmates are guilty of their crimes, including the protagonist Piper Chapman, and all of them are portrayed in all their humanity.