Clemency

24 July 2020

*plot details and difficult subject matter ahead*

The social, cultural and emotional effects of imprisonment and the release of political prisoners were topics I researched extensively for my PhD thesis on visual culture and social change in post-Agreement Northern Ireland. Since beginning that research in 2008, I have understood imprisonment as a mechanism for social control veiled as a system for the punishment of crime and the rehabilitation of criminals into society. I came to see firsthand that the latter, if reached, was achieved by prisoners themselves and facilitated by educators and often arts-based charitable organisations. While the deaths of prisoners do happen, whether due to external violence or self-harm, capital punishment ended in the UK in 1964 (although it was not fully abolished until 1969, and 1973 in NI). When current films such as Clemency (dir. Chinonye Chukwu, 2019) emerge, it is a shock to be reminded that states in the country that claims to lead the 'free world' still put people to death at all, and even in cases where there is a shadow of a doubt cast over the conviction.

I think my first encounter with this knowledge came in studying The Thin Blue Line (dir. Errol Morris, 1988) in my final-year documentary module. That assignment was one of the best of my whole degree. I watched the film five times in one day while researching it. Its power was such that its subject Randall Dale Adams, who had been on death row before his sentence was brought down to life imprisonment, was ultimately released with all charges dropped due to the irrefutable case made by the evidence and argument presented in the film. Morris came across Adams when researching a different film project about the psychiatrist whose testimony helped get Adams convicted with the death penalty. Adams was only one of up to 167 such convictions in Texas involving Dr James Grigson, whose life seems to have unravelled after this exposure of his malpractice. Adams is also the only case I can find in cursory searches that, albeit twelve years too late, was thrown out. He was also a white man. Given the statistics below, we can only imagine the anonymous others who didn't make it and their likely ethnicities.

In 2015, I had a colleague who was working on a film project with a working title, if I remember correctly, of From the Plantation to the Penitentiary. This was my introduction to what I would later learn through Ava DuVernay's 13th documentary (2016) that the thirteenth amendment to the US constitution only abolished slavery unless there was a conviction of a crime, meaning that prisoners could be put to labour and that it didn't necessarily take much to become incarcerated in the first place, particularly if you are considered to be in some way 'other', i.e., not a straight, white, non-disabled, middle-class/wealthy white man.

Here, I make an unlikely association with My Name is Earl (NBC, 2005-9), the sitcom series set in an unnamed southern state in which Earl's (Jason Lee) ex, Joy (Jaime Pressly), faces life imprisonment - an automatic 25-year sentence - for her third strike. That is, Joy had committed what many of us might consider as three petty crimes for which you might receive a fine, community service or a suspended short sentence in the UK. It might come as a surprise to learn that this 3-strike system as well as increased militarisation of policing were initiated by President Bill Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill. Given Joy's socio-economic background (she arguably adds nuance to the 'trailer trash' trope), these are also crimes that could be, not excused as such, but understood. It took an irreverant and well-meaning, but perhaps ham-fisted (I haven't seen it for ten years), US comedy to alert someone like me in the UK that this was basically how judiciary works there. Add race and the legacies of slavery to the mixture and an even more insidious picture emerges.

Now, in my PhD research I studied and met former prisoners, many of whom had been interned without trial. Perhaps there is a broadstrokes similarity, or enough to evoke empathy, with imprisonment on flimsy evidence that provides an enslaved workforce in the guise of upholding justice. I bring this up because there are some who would equate the historical indentured servitude of Irish people with the enslavement of Africans. No doubt tragedy and trauma occurred, but selling your labour for passage to and eventual but guaranteed freedom in the 'New World' is categorically not the same as being ripped from your homeland and you and any of your progeny being put to hard labour for life. The internment without trial during the Northern Ireland conflict occurred when the judical system could not cope with the volume of trails. Shockingly, it is pointed out in 13th that 97% of US inmates had no trial, one reason being that most people facing convictions cannot afford bail or legal representation and so succumb to plea bargains. Furthermore in modern incarceration, apart from perhaps the results of collusion during the NI conflict, there is nothing close to an equivalent in the UK for the ultimate violence against the body: public state-sanctioned murder in the death penalty.

In 13th it is stated that 6.5% of the US population is designated as male African-American and this demographic makes up 40.2% of the US prison population. The conclusion that can easily be inferred from these numbers is that they refer to inherently bad people, an often uncorrected assumption that the film and DuVernay's other works such as When They See Us (2019) dispell. These are people more likely to either be driven to or blamed for crimes of any kind whether they have committed them or not in order to enslave and justify violence towards black bodies. And in the works mentioned here, we are specifically looking at cis-male black bodies and haven't reached the violence inflicted on black women and minority genders that is doubled by silence and their removal from visibility.

What these films do point towards, though, and something Clemency examines in some detail, is the effects on the women integral to the lives of the men prisoners. They include Warden Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard), Evette (Danielle Brooks), the former girlfriend of death row prisoner Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge), and Mrs Collins (Vernee Watson-Johnson), the mother of the police officer for whose murder Woods was convicted. Also notable is Ms Jimenez (Alma Martinez), mother of Victor Jimenez (Alex Castillo), whose botched execution begins the film and establishes Williams's metaphorical need for clemency - in a legal sense for the prisoners in her care, and in a psychological sense for her part in ending their lives and what that is doing to her own.

Promotional still for Clemency

Whether Williams is convinced by lawyer Marty Lumetta's (Richard Schiff) evidence of his client's innocence is hard to tell due to Woodard's restrained performance. What is clear is that this aspect of her job - and Woods will be her twelfth execution - is breaking her and her energy is spent on holding together the surface veneer of the very capable professional she has always been. A similar but more visible and swift breaking is seen in Logan Cartwright (LaMonica Garrett) who freezes in the run-through of Woods's execution and must admit that Jimenez's excrutiating death weighs on him. This foreshadows Williams's own freezing when she cannot pronounce Woods's death.

In Evette's case, we witness a powerful scene in which she refuses to carry guilt for getting on with her life and establishing a family with another man after Woods's arrest. As well as the nuanced acting that produced a highly emotive response in me, and the way the two were filmed alone either side of the protective visiting barrier having to hold phone receivers during a complex conversation, the difference from typical 'wife-as-visitor' characters in prison films was a refreshing change. For example, in Hunger (dir. Steve McQueen, 2008) - which in terms of its artistic cinematography and frame compositions set a precendent for Clemency - the partners and mothers are two-dimensional and serve only the most perfunctory of functions (expressing worry, delivering contraband, providing sexual titilation, and so on).

At the start of Clemency, Ms Jimenez's anguish concerns her son's life and salvation, but it is her anguish and her sense of powerlessness we witness as opposed to dialogue telling us about it. Furthermore, Mrs Collins's distress as a bereft mother and justice-seeking grandmother are felt through her brief interactions with Warden Williams. That these visiting women are themselves considered as ethnic minorities - Latina and African-American - adds more significance for what must be enforced experiences of silenced grief. The mixed marriage of Officer Collins's parents infers his own mixed racial identity: a half-black, half-white cop, it seems, of a middle-class upbringing. This further complicates the dynamic, especially as the global viewing public become increasingly aware of racially motivated violence by militarised police forces. However, acts that are treated as criminal and the ways they are policed are not explicitly in question in the film, but provide the complex tapestry in which (cis-het) mothers and (ex-)partners find themselves.

There is certainly much scope to compare the mothers in Clemency with those in Irish and Irish-themed prison films, but my interest lies in that striking scene between Evette and Woods. With excitement and hope at her visit, Woods dares to believe they with the son he's never met can finally be a family. He doesn't let her talk at first, believing he knows she's sorry for moving on, only for her to insist her voice be heard so she can tell him without shame that she is not sorry she put herself and their child first. He will be remembered while she will someday die anonymous. While on the face of this brief description we could understand that her life only became dictated by male figures in her life, the way she delivers her speech and holds herself indicates her autonomy in making choices. I got the sense that it wasn't necessarily guilt or doing Woods a favour that made her get in touch; I felt rather she needed the release for herself. She needed Woods to know her truth instead of allowing him to believe his assumption of her truth. Brief as her appearance is, Evette is the developed female character we've been shrieking hysterically for (I'm being ironic, of course) for so long; it isn't unfeminist or unrealistic for women to be partners and mothers, but it is if they are written to possess no autonomy or desire for control over their own lives.

It is a powerful sequence requiring closer study than I can conduct effectively from the memory of one viewing, and it no doubt will be (and ought to be) the focus of academic studies that I will not author. But I will bank these thoughts in case I ever get round to trying the book of essays I've been mulling over for a while now. What this scene emphasises, and one of the reasons why I urge others to view the film, is that it's never just the convict who suffers from their imprisonment, and indeed, it is their loved ones and the victims of the crime who incur an arguably worse form of figurative incarceration, frozen in stasis ever seeking resolution or justice or an end, carrying shame and guilt by association, or living with refusing to do so. The longer term suffering of these systems of control are the real violence. Their effects are interminable, their ramifications unending and generational.

-----

With huge thanks to Birds Eye View's Reclaim the Frame initiative for the chance to watch Clemency ahead of its release on the World International Day of Justice last Friday. Their Q&A for the film's UK release can be viewed here.