Javonte Robinson said he didn’t know much about the history of the U.S. criminal justice system before he found himself a part of it: confined in the D.C. jail awaiting trial, with a lot of time to reflect.
Now, he knows a whole lot more after watching an excerpt of a new, sweeping PBS documentary about crime and punishment in America. On Tuesday, Robinson and a group of several dozen detainees at the D.C. jail were among the first in the country to see a portion of the eight-hour film. Like many in the room, he left with an understanding that while the country’s justice system has evolved over the centuries, many of its deepest flaws persist.
“It was a lot of things that was eye-opening to me … when the first prisons first started, it was for people to get locked up and repent. Now it’s for people to come get locked up and ‘rehabilitate,’” he said. But, he added, “it’s basically the same; it’s no rehabilitation because the recidivism rate is outrageous.”
The Tuesday screening, a 45-minute excerpt from the project, was the seventh showing of the documentary behind bars. It arrived as the D.C. jail is facing multiple class-action lawsuits over issues ranging from poor medical care to mice in food, and weeks after an inmate died in a stabbing. Lynn Novick, the director of the film, attended and took questions from viewers. What resulted was a robust discussion about the history of the criminal justice system, exactly the kind of dialogue Novick said she hoped the film would produce.
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“You can’t really understand America without knowing this story, but I think most people don’t know the history,” she said, after one inmate asked her why she made the film. “Some of these are really hard questions, and I think we’re so polarized and divided, we have not been able to have hard conversations and really dig deep into how to get to a better place. And I actually think that making this film the way we made it can help with that.”
The film excerpt took viewers from the era of public executions before the Revolutionary War to the 20th-century war on drugs and the present day. Along the way, it featured the perspectives of people who had been touched by the criminal justice system, from incarcerated people to crime victims to people who have worked in jails and prisons.
One inmate was particularly struck by the account of a former corrections officer who said that he took the job in part because he couldn’t achieve other career goals. During the Q&A after the film, he said the officer’s story gave him the idea that working in jails and prison was for many an “occupation by default.”
Reginald Dwayne Betts, a formerly incarcerated poet and advocate who was featured in the film, interrupted to push back.
“I wouldn’t think it was appropriate if anybody on this panel started making generalizations about who you guys are,” he said, urging the man to keep in mind that corrections officers are motivated to do the job for a variety of reasons.
A pair of D.C. corrections officers sat in the back of the screening, silent.
“I think the reason why we put that in the film is to have this conversation,” said Novick, “and to be able to have the potential that we can see everybody as human beings … people who are confined here and people who work here are subject to difficult conditions.”
Robinson was struck by how far back in history the film went, to the Code of Hammurabi and the concepts of crime and punishment in religion. He said he was shocked to learn the true story of American folk hero John Henry — who, according to the documentary, was likely a teenage convict, locked up on a petty theft charge, leased to work on a railroad and then died because of poor working conditions. “I didn’t know that,” Robinson said. He wondered if his new knowledge could help him navigate the justice system — and “maybe I can help somebody else through my experience,” he said.
The film, geared toward a general audience and designed in many ways to teach people with no personal experience of incarceration, hit close to home in the room, a small chapel behind the jail’s thick gray walls.
Watching it was “powerful and painful,” reflected one inmate, who asked to be referred to by his first name, Abraham. An Ethiopian immigrant, he got emotional as he described the moment he walked into the D.C. jail — and how it put the racial disparities the film highlighted into instant relief.
“I still cannot forget,” he said, “how I felt seeing the amount of Black people.”
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