Prison Movies and Books

In order to understand more about prisons, officers, and criminals, I’ve watched at least 20 prison movies in the past two month. Some of them are brutual (The Experiment, Law Abiding Citizen), some of them are touching (The Green Mile, The Longest Yard) , some of them are hilarious (Big Stan).

Gridiron Gang is a touching movie, based on a true story about kids at the Camp Kilpatrick, LA County Probation Department. The supervisor and former football player Sean Porter sees the lack of discipline, self-esteem, union and perspective in the teenage interns and proposes to prepare a football team to play in one league to fill their void. With the support of his superiors, he coaches and leads the kids to become mentally tough by playing football together. His successful experience changes the lives of many young kids at the detention center.

True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall by Mark Salzman was touching about juvenile delinquents. Mark taught at a writing class for boys at LA’s Central Juvenile Hall in 1977, a lockup for violent teenage offenders, including thoses charged with murders. The redemptive power of writing gives the boys a chance to come to terms with their crime-ridden pasts and searching for a reason to believe in their future selves.

In the US, the juvenile halls are filled with gangsters kids from minorities, black, hispatic, orientals. In a more homogenous society in Taiwan, the kids at detention centers are mainly from broken families. Likewise in the world, quite a few are gangsters kids.

It is a serendipity to know another dimension of the real world through prison volunteers. I felt blissful when I conducted a book reading of True Notebooks at Taipei City Library Wanhua Branch Saturday morning, May 23rd.