Film Review of Released
A film by Philip Messina
The Video Project (2013)
Reviewed by Sejal H. Patel
By age 10, Casimiro Torres had learned to negotiate life with his single, alcoholic mother. The state took him and his brother away from their mom and placed them in a juvenile detention center under the care of physically and sexually abusive counselors. The young brothers ran away, scraping by on the streets by stealing food and searching in vain for their mother. “I started getting high to numb the pain,” Torres remembers. Torres was ultimately arrested 67 times and served 16 years in prison.
I watched Torres tell his story in the 2013 documentary film Released. In the film, Torres and three other former inmates shared their life stories from adolescence to incarceration to redemption. As criminal defense attorneys, we have heard these stories — so often, in fact, that child, drug, sexual, and physical abuse and recidivism feel like weathered, warped folk tales. We see evidence of what our clients have endured in sentencing memos and probation reports. Our clients’ personal histories cloak our work with empathy, with a sense of injustice that these people were born into jail as much as they were later placed in one. And then it is no wonder what happens to them upon their release.
Released is a film adapted from the 2008 off-Broadway play “The Castle,” in which Torres, Vilma Ortiz Donovan, Kenneth Harrigan, and Angel Ramos sit on wooden stools and take turns speaking. Their experiences share a trilogy format — three lives in one, really: before prison, in prison, and after prison. The title of the movie draws our eyes to the third of those stories, or the “after prison” part. The film asks us to consider what being released from prison really means.
None of the four speakers experienced much by way of security in their lives before they went to jail. They told stories in the film about scouring through garbage cans looking for food and living in homes of fists, bottles, and needles. Some doubted their own sanity. Others found no growth or opportunity in education. They all felt constantly threatened about how to protect their bodies. These offenders were, at their core, vulnerable people. Prison provided more stability to them in some ways than being on the outside. This inverted truth lies at the heart of the film — freedom can be more punitive than incarceration. Angel Ramos put it best when he said of his release after a 30-year sentence: “How do I live like a normal human being when I have no idea what normal is?”
That said, prison was no panacea. There too, the inmates’ sense of security was constantly under threat, where a failure to nod to another inmate could lead to a death sentence. Torres tells us in the film that his left forearm is covered with knife wounds because he used that hand to defend, and the other to punch. Kenneth Harrigan reframed his life narrative in order to survive. “Make the cell where you want to be,” he counseled himself so that he felt some control over his situation. He found two places of solace when he was locked up — the church and the law library. And Ramos found hope in a prison volunteer and educator named May who taught him to read. Vilma Ortiz Donovan wanted to leave drug dealing behind, but she did not trust that she was smart enough to make anything of her life.
Torres, Harrigan, Ramos, and Donovan each declare at the end of the film: “I am a taxpayer.” The ending is somewhat glib, like an IRS commercial, but the point of it is well-taken. To succeed upon release, people need jobs. Happy endings are possible, but the film tells us that we need more places like the Castle to make that happen.
“The Castle” is the name of a 60- bed residence in West Harlem that, along with companion facilities in Manhattan, takes ex-convicts in and helps them become productive members of society. The Fortune Society, founded in 1967 by David Rothenberg, runs the Castle and takes a “whole client” approach to helping inmates re-enter society. Staff members provide inmates with a place to live and help them with employment, education, families, and their health.
Torres, Harrigan, Ramos, and Donovan credit the Fortune Society with helping them turn their lives around. “We need a thousand Castles,” they say. Torres now works as a substance abuse counselor, Harrigan is a minister, Ramos is in school, and Donovan both works at the Fortune Society and is in community college. Each finds his or her own version of release, inside and out.