giornata, 3/6/2025

they yearn for faces

Giornata is my weekly media diary, a paid feature, coming out on Thursdays, covering whatever I read, watched, or listened to in the last week!

Content warning: I discuss the murder of a sex worker in one of the capsules here in the context of how witnessing news coverage of that event informed my decriminalization and prison abolition journey.

Sing Sing (dir. Greg Kwedar): From the trailer for Sing Sing, I kind of anticipated a saccharine, emotionally manipulative film that would make me cry and that I might resent a little for it, with a half-measure reform message. I think this Letterboxd review gets at what I worry about the takeaway will be for a viewer who is not approaching it already primed with an abolitionist perspective. The film centers on a real program in Sing Sing Correctional Facility called Rehabilitation Through the Arts, where incarcerated people perform plays. Most of the incarcerated characters are played by alumni of the program playing themselves and two alumni, Clarence Maclin and John “Divine G” Whitfield get screenplay credits.

The incongruity present here is that prison is not and cannot be rehabilitative. This reality is a core tenant of abolition, exposing one of the main justifications for incarceration from well-meaning people. When prison is named as what is it, ultimately and exclusively retributive, I find that these well-meaning people experience discomfort thinking about the scale of prison sentences and the pattern of recidivism when this is pointed out, but that discomfort can lead to more sympathy for the abolitionist cause. Any program that promises rehabilitation or liberation in prison is a band-aid on the trauma that is actively being enacted by incarceration.

The review I think takes issue with the narrative being concerned with John (played by Colman Domingo)'s innocence. I too struggle with this framing in many reform-minded pieces of art and advocacy platforms, since prison abolition centers on the idea that innocence and guilt do not matter because the issue is that incarceration is inhumane and the state should not have the power to incarcerate its citizens, especially when that system of incarceration has shown time and time again that it will always be wielded unfairly and disproportionately against people of color, especially Black men. The framing of “rehabilitation” in any setting also runs afoul of the abolitionist perspective because rehabilitated from what? Being born an identity that is criminalized? Being sent back to prison for administrative violations of probation and parole terms?

But in Sing Sing, there is a character who unequivocally admits to the crimes he is accused of (Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, who plays himself) and I think he is given as much sympathy and understanding as G, though he is in a more supporting role. My takeaway from the film was that RTA is a stopgap, but it imagines a practice of giving tools for liberatory art to people, for free, in their communities. The men in the film are in a community made piecemeal in a situation that shouldn’t exist. I can imagine someone watching and thinking “the solution is more Shakespeare in prisons,” but I do hope more people watch it and think “the solution is no more prison, and Shakespeare is a bonus.” I was moved by the film, especially with the knowledge of the participation of the alumni and the structure of the profit sharing by cast and crew, and by Domingo and Maclin’s performances. Two all-time great faces.