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By Michael HowardPhoto: Dr. Paul and Lori Sutton at the San Diego Film Awards. Photo courtesy of Paul Sutton
November 11, 2024 (San Diego) – A retired San Diego State University professor is poised to sweep the San Diego film festival scene this month when his short documentary From Pen to Paper about imprisoned men who take a creative writing course screens for a second time in as many festivals.
“As soon as we won the San Diego Film Awards, we thought, well, maybe we got something,” Dr. Paul Sutton joked when he spoke to East County Magazine recently.
Photo, right: prisoners and students in the prison writing class. Photo courtesy of Paul SuttonThe Professor Emeritus in Criminal Justice submitted the documentary to the San Diego Film Awards earlier this year in hopes of shedding light on how society sees the prison system.
“I wasn’t pushing a point of view,” Sutton explained. “What I was pushing is to abandon your biases. Just watch and listen and make up your own mind. Is that how it ought to be done? Is that fair? Is that just? Is that efficient? Is that wise? And ask that about everything,” he clarified.
Then in June, he was notified he won Best Short Documentary, and everything just began to snowball.
“Once we won San Diego, now we’re getting invitations to submit to Paris, Madrid, and Berlin because they solicit from those lists of winners,” Sutton reports.
With that first win under his belt, Sutton began to submit to festivals around the country, and the wins kept coming.
Photo left: a student and inmate in the prison writing class. Photo courtesy of Paul Sutton“We won best documentary up in Healdsburg about a month ago and we won the Diamond Award in Albuquerque and we’ve been accepted to Anaheim, which is next week,” the professor said.
Sutton says what makes the just under 30-minute film unique is what they asked the prisoners to do.
“We’re asking these guys to abandon everything that keeps them alive. We’re asking them to reject all the behaviors that make them safe. You’ve got to open yourself up. You’ve got to trust. You’ve got to communicate. We’ve got to make them care about themselves and care about each other,” he emphasized.
Sutton believes the underlying structure of United States prisons is detrimental to the opportunity to prisoner’s success.
“Because it destroys people,” he points out. “You can't have imagination. You can't have initiative. You can't have ambition. All the things that we want people to do and become and exhibit on the outside are things that are suppressed on the inside in the name of order and security.”
Sutton might be onto something. According to a 2020 study, nearly 44% of U.S. prisoners are rearrested before the first year out of prison. By five years, the rate jumps to 77% and by nine years, the rate is a whopping 83%.
Compared to other countries, the U.S. ranks third in prisoner reconvictions, tied with New Zealand, at 60% within a two-year period of being released. Only Sweden and Denmark are higher at 61% and 63% respectively.
Photo, right: inmate "Sal" from the prison writing class. Photo courtesy of Paul Sutton
According to World Population Review, California’s prisoner’s recidivism rate is among the highest compared to other states. Recidivism averages around 50% over the last 10 years, with the most recent data in 2018 exhibiting a slight decrease, landing at 44.65%. Comparatively, Oregon comes in at 13.1%.Sutton, who lives in East County San Diego, thinks this film, and the several others he’s produced in his over 30 years working in this field, might just be chipping away at the system.
“I was able to break down a lot of walls and barriers on both the inmate side and the guard side in order to get done the things I was able to get done. When I look back at it in that sense, it’s pretty phenomenal,” he recognized.
Sutton reports over the course of his career he’s taken 3,000 students on 113 different statewide excursions to prisons up and down the state of California, from San Quentin to Pelican Bay, and everywhere in between.
“It was during that time that I really got to know a lot of people inside prison, both guards and inmates, and it fueled my teaching, my research, my writing and some new film ideas,” he reveals.
Some of those new film ideas are currently in the works, according to Sutton.
“I’ve got three movies I’ve shot that we need to edit and get out,” he says. “Badass is one of them, and that’s the whole story from the guard’s perspective. We are doing another one Santos, who was the artist who did all the famous murals on the San Quentin walls,” Sutton adds.
What he’s working on now is related to the film he’s submitted to the film festivals.
“Next week when we go to the Old Town Film Festival in Santa Ana, we are going to introduce two or three of the guys who were in the writing class in preparation for our next documentary,” he explains. “It’s going to be about the lives of these guys once they got out and they have some incredible stories of where they are and what they’re doing.”
In the meantime, Sutton’s From Pen to Paper is vying for an award at the upcoming San Diego Film week, where if he wins, it will complete the festival sweep of San Diego Film Consortium festivals.
Those interested in viewing the film at the festival on November 17 at 5:00 p.m. can buy tickets at sdfilmweek.com/2024/movies/from-pen-to-paper. Sutton encourages folks to come out and see it.
“One of the realities is the more the people that go to a screening, the more likely you are to get an award,” Sutton says.
SOURCES
Sutton, P. (2024, October 26). Professor Emeritus, San Diego State University [Personal communication].
World Population Review. (n.d.-a). Recidivism Rates by Country 2024. Retrieved October 27, 2024, from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/recidivism-rates-by-c...
World Population Review. (n.d.-b). Recidivism Rates by State 2024. Retrieved October 27, 2024, from https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/recidivism-rates-by-state
Yukhnenko, D., Sridhar, S., & Fazel, S. (2020, November 3). A systematic review of criminal recidivism ... | Wellcome Open Research. https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/4-28/v3
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