Twenty-four prisoners–mostly lifers–sat across from a dozen college students on a maximum security prison yard in southern California as part of an innovative and inspiring creative writing class. For 14 weeks, prisoners learned to express themselves openly and honestly, many for the first time in their lives, to a group of strangers, in a setting where survival often demands alienation, disaffection, even violence.
And the students–at first apprehensive, even hateful–discovered that the men across from them were far from the callous and unfeeling monsters they had expected to meet.
Though their often intimate collaboration, both groups found hope and humanity in a place where they had expected neither.
Ph.D., Criminal Justice, SUNY-Albany (1975)
M.A., Criminal Justice, SUNY-Albany (1971)
B.A., Political Science & History, University of Kansas (1970)
* Producer, Director, Writer, Editor. “Prison Through Tomorrow’s Eyes” (56 min.; 2013) feature documentary chronicling life-changing experiences of 24 university students who come face-to-face with California’s prison system in an intensive, weeklong immersion into the world behind bars.
* Co-producer. “Doing Time: Ten Years Later” (58 min.; 1991) Emmy-winning feature documentary reprising life and conditions at the Penitentiary of New Mexico, site of the bloodiest riot in American prison history, ten years after the making of Doing Time.
* Executive Producer. “Doing Time” (59 min.; 1980) Emmy-winning feature documentary about life behind bars; one of the first of the prison documentary genre. shot at the ill-fated Penitentiary of New Mexico, site of the bloodiest riot in American prison history.
Sutton has produced several award-winning prison documentaries, published numerous books, articles, and and research monographs, and appeared frequently in print and broadcast media as an expert on a variety of criminal justice policies and issues in the U.S.
currently in post-production:
POOCH: Training Service Animals Behind Bars
BADASS: Memoirs of a San Quentin O.G.
SANTOS: Art Inside the Walls
PAUL SUTTON:
I speak of myself not so much as a filmmaker as a criminal justice professor who loves to makes films. Having been in and out of prisons across America literally hundreds of times, I am struck by the abject inhumanity of institutions that are so often staffed and populated by fundamentally decent men and women. Early in my career as a CJ professor, I resolved to change that system: documentary filmmaking became not only my avocation, but my passion.
My first prison was Attica, where I was a special investigator for the McKay Commission appointed to investigate the 1971 riot. As a graduate student in criminal justice at SUNY-Albany, I discovered that many–perhaps most–inmates are not so different from the rest of us. I also discovered the power of film as both a story-telling and social-action medium; while the written Attica Report got the eye of a few thousand, the documentary about that ill-fated prison captured the attention of millions.
While still in graduate school, I was appointed the first federal prison intern, in 1973, in Petersburg, Virginia. That experience shaped my views about incarceration and fueled my curiosity about the men and women behind bars. Those same years gave us the iconic prison heroes of “Cool Hand Luke,” “Papillon,” and “Brubaker” (whose real-life namesake I would later befriend). I was gripped by the inhumanity of prison and the its anthropomorphic tendency to destroy. Wilde had it right: “it is only what is good in man that wastes and withers there.”
My first foray into actual filmmaking came while I was a rookie Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico. Following a routine tour of the tragic Penitentiary of New Mexico. I partnered with an English professor and an independent filmmaker to produce the first real prison documentary–the Emmy-winning “Doing Time,” in 1980. Two months after that program premiered on PBS, that prison erupted in the bloodiest prison riot in American history. Ten years later, my team returned to reprise the story in a second Emmy winner–Doing Time: Ten Years Later.
By the time I joined the faculty at SDSU, prisons and prison life continued to dominate my attention. My second year at SDSU, I initiated the now nationally famous California “PrisonTour”–a 1200-mile, weeklong excursion by charter bus through 8 to 10 prisons across California. Over the next 30 years, I escorted nearly 3,000 students on more than 100 five-day, mind-bending excursions into the bowels of California’s prison system, where they could see it all–the good, the bad, and the ugly. That experience was captured in my third documentary, “Prison Through Tomorrow’s Eyes.”
My exposure to prisons has been the genesis of my own prison reform efforts (including the creative writing class featured in “Straight from the Pen,”) in addition to our unique series of movies documenting such efforts. Each of my documentaries focuses on the practice and institution of incarceration, as well as, more importantly, the men and women who live and work inside.
LORI SUTTON:
Having spent nearly 20 years in a television production capacity, I often witnessed stories being told without fairness, balance, nor complete truth. This is what compelled me to jump in and try to get it right. In the process of being introduced intimately to hundreds of America’s discarded—among the hundreds of thousands of men and women locked up in America’s prisons—I had the opportunity to work with an incredible number of wonderfully talented people; people who were labeled worthless, beyond redemption. During that process, I re-visited my own abilities and decided to turn them to a new purpose.
I graduated from San Diego State University with a degree in Telecommunications and Film, with a minor in English. I love the written word. Having served as a Teaching Assistant for my (now) husband, I was frustrated with students ‘ inability to write soundly, correctly, or effectively.
When we designed our ambitious creative writing course inside prison, I was expecting the worst from the prisoners inside Richard J. Donovan prison. How could these men—many of whom had little or no formal education—possibly perform adequately? How could they find words the words to communicate feelings and emotions they had hardly dealt with themselves, let alone shared with other?
Beautifully, my worries were put to rest. These men, despite limited formal education, already had the tools. I recall telling one writer, “You know how to write. You just don’t necessarily know the names of the tools you are using, just as a construction guy knows how to build a home, though he may not know the names of the square, the level, or the special nail gun he uses. But he knows how to use them.”
This class has been a most gratifying experience. “People,” in general, are reluctant to share their thoughts or emotions, especially with strangers; prisoners even more so. I have come to respect their bravery above that of most others I know. I have yet to meet a “regular” person willing to expose him- or herself in the way these men have done. And, thankfully, we are all the better for it.