Crime and Punishment in America: Q+A with Lynn Novick

Filmmaker Lynn Novick has spent decades telling stories about American history, but Crime and Punishment in America began with a realization that surprised even her: she didn’t really understand the history of incarceration in the United States. The four-part, eight-hour documentary series directed by Lynn Novick and produced by Ken Burns and Sam Pollard, traces how America developed its modern system of crime and punishment – and asks what understanding that history might make possible today. The project grew out of College Behind Bars, Lynn’s 2019 PBS documentary about incarcerated students pursuing higher education.

We spoke with Lynn about what she learned from both films, what she hopes audiences take away from the series, and why she believes documentaries can create something we desperately need: proximity.

Q. What first drew you to the history of incarceration in America?

After Prohibition was released, my producing partner Sarah Botstein and I were invited to present the film to a college class inside a maximum-security prison through the Bard Prison Initiative in New York State. We had one of the most profound and eye-opening conversations about our work, our process and our choices with these incredibly engaged students, and we walked out of there thinking, “Wow, that was amazing. Someone should make a documentary about this program.”

As it happened, I was given the opportunity to teach there myself, and that allowed me to get to know the students, faculty and administrators and really understand how the program worked. By the time that was done, Sarah and I had decided we had to make the film. We filmed over several years, following people as they applied to college, went to college, graduated and came home. That became College Behind Bars, and that film led me to a much bigger question: how did we get here?

Q. What assumptions about incarceration did you begin to question?

Working on College Behind Bars, I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t really know anything about the history of crime and punishment. People often ask me, “What surprised you?” and I kind of want to say –and I don’t mean to be flip– everything surprised me because I didn’t know anything. I’m a fairly well-informed person and a student of American history, but I’d never really looked at our history through this lens.

One of the huge aha moments for us working on the film was the realization that there have been prisons, but they weren’t institutionalized in the way that we have them today, and they weren’t linked to a promise of rehabilitation. They weren’t for people who had committed what we would call ordinary crimes. This whole construct had to be created and caught on, and now it’s so baked into our society that we can’t imagine it wasn’t always here.

Q. What do you hope audiences take away from Crime and Punishment in America?

All of us who worked on the film hope the film can shed some light on this complex and often tragic history without pointing fingers or blaming. I think blaming is such a toxic dynamic in our culture right now. Can we all take some accountability and responsibility for the way things are, understand how we got here, and have a meaningful dialogue about what we need to do to move forward?

There are no easy answers, unfortunately. But I think too often in America we haven’t even tried. We talk about crime and people who are in prison in very sensational and dehumanizing ways, and I hope this film, in all of its complexity and nuance, allows for a much deeper conversation and for people to maybe open their minds and hearts to think about how we can do better.