Eight-hour series traces U.S. justice system from colonial period
As the lights dimmed in the Our Lady of Hope chapel at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, around 30 incarcerated men took seats across the pews to preview a new docuseries on the history of the nation’s criminal justice system. The chapel was soon alive with discussion, as some viewers encountered an American institution they already knew from personal experience.
The four-part series, “Crime and Punishment in America,” is set to premiere Monday on PBS. Across eight hours it traces how the justice system evolved from the colonial period to the present day, and viewers hear from legal scholars, formerly incarcerated people, victims’ families and corrections officers.
The United States holds the world’s largest incarcerated population, with nearly two million people behind bars in prisons and jails. In 2024, each state incarcerated more people per capita than most countries, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
“What are we hoping to accomplish with this?” Novick said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Digging into the history and revealing it will help us to have a different conversation about what justice means in this country.”
Novick developed the series with frequent collaborator Ken Burns, a filmmaker with numerous PBS documentaries to his name. In 2019, the two partnered on “College Behind Bars,” which followed a Bard College program to provide a liberal arts education to incarcerated people.
Sing Sing marked Novick’s sixth screening of the project for prison populations in correctional facilities: prisons in Maine, Connecticut, California and Washington state, as well as New York City’s Rikers’ jail, have hosted previews of “Crime and Punishment in America.” The Sing Sing prisoners were shown a 47-minute reel from the full series.
“I hope that as people see this documentary, that they are challenged to think about what we have to do differently,” said Michael Shane Hale, 54 and from Kentucky, who has served 32 years of a 50-to-life prison sentence.
Hale said the viewing public should no longer question whether it’s possible for prisoners to turn their lives around. The question, he added, should instead be “what do we do with transformed people?”
The conversation at Sing Sing grew more animated than Novick had anticipated. Some of the prisoners gathered in the chapel were invigorated by news of California Gov. Gavin Newsom saying he would commute hundreds of death sentences before leaving office, which experts say would be the largest mass clemency in American history.
Several prisoners pressed a panel of speakers with concerns about what rehabilitation through incarceration looks like for their families and for victims. Others drew connections between their crimes, mental illness and economic circumstances.
“Nobody is the sum of their worst mistake, right?” said José Colon, 44 and from the Bronx, who entered prison at age 17 and has been incarcerated for nearly 28 years. “No matter where you are in life, there’s always room for growth.”
John Rizzo, another Sing Sing prisoner, asked the panel what “rehabilitation” means to society. “When we come in here, we’re tainted,” Rizzo said later in an interview with the AP. “When we go back out into society, when is the incarcerated individual going to be acceptable again?”
Rizzo has served 16 years so far on a conviction for conspiracy and attempted murder. He said he spends his time helping peers apply for prison jobs and studying for a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science that he intends to earn while incarcerated.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, a panelist and poet who served eight years for a carjacking at 16, agreed with Rizzo. People seemed to focus on his past when he returned to life after prison, he said. “It was always, ‘Can you tell me more about your crime?’” Betts has created a documentary following his life and became known for his work installing libraries in the nation’s prisons.
Daniel F. Martuscello III, the first former correction officer appointed commissioner of the New York State Department of Correction, said he agreed to screen Novick’s film because he sees it as an extension of the prison’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts workshops.
“It’s our obligation, not only as commissioners, but as people running the system, lawmakers, to make sure that we’re telling that story,” Martuscello said. “Because to not do so, it takes away from that transformation, and really, it degrades public safety.”
John J. Lennon is an incarcerated Sing Sing prison journalist and a recipient of a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant to support scholars, artists and scientists for work “under the freest possible conditions.” In-prison programs, he says, are what allowed him to build a writing career after entering prison with a ninth-grade education.
Lennon said New York, and the nation as a whole, has much more reform work to do. “If you want accountability in America, then there has to be forgiveness on the table,” Lennon said. “There has to be mercy on the table.”