Sean Pica seems like an achingly normal, dweeby guy from Long Island: middle-aged, bespectacled, mild-mannered to the point of eluding our notice. Yet he's a convicted murderer who killed someone in cold blood.
"First Degree" is the tale not of Pica's crime, but what he and others like him did with his time in prison, and after. This probing documentary from director Roger Weisberg looks at college education problems in federal prisons, attempting to turn hardened criminals into productive members of society after they leave.
Laudably, the film manages to make its point without being shrill or partisan. These programs are good for the men and women who are transformed, it suggests, but also because of the good they do -- and the absence of the bad they might otherwise do.
Pica himself went to Sing Sing for killing a classmate's abusive father while in high school. He came out with "more time in prison than out," $40 in his pocket... but a college diploma he earned while there. Today he's the director of educational opportunities at the same place where he once served time.
We also get to meet inmates going through the program, like Jermaine Archer. A former drug-dealing boss who claims he did not pull the trigger for the murder that sent him to Sing Sing, he nonetheless recognizes the harm he did to the community. "Every time I put a gun in a kid's hand, weed in his backpack or crack, I murdered someone," he says.
In a moving scene, Jermaine receives his college diploma at an in-prison ceremony with his family there to bear witness. Especially important to him are his two young nephews who revered him for his former gangbanger ways. With a grandfather, father and brothers who all did time in prison, he wants the youngest scions of his clan to admire him now for the right reasons. He yearns for the cycle to stop. And he wants to go back to his old neighborhood and repair the cracks he tore open.
"I know if I do not go back to Flatbush and make amends, then my journey will not be complete."
Weisberg throws some salient facts and figures our way. While nearly half of federal parolees are back in prison within three years, less than 1% of graduates of the college program over the past 14 years have been caught in recidivism. Government funding for these types of programs has been cut, with private donations struggling to make up the gap.
If I have a quibble with the film, it's the use of a celebrity interviewer (John Fugelsang) who acts in the director's stead to appear on camera and ask questions. He reminded me of the William Hurt character in "Broadcast News," straining to appear thoughtful and engaged during the cutaways. It's a totally unnecessary gimmick, and distracting.
Still, "First Degree" is a strong, straightforward doc that sheds light on an important social issue. Yes, it's important to punish wrongdoers... but then what do we do with them? Better to lift them into the light than pound them into perpetual darkness.