Prisons serve as giant holding pens for people our society has come to see as subhuman. Sing Sing resists such dehumanization through a tender portrait of the creative capabilities and emotional lives of prison actors.
When Irish left-wing labor leader James Larkin arrived in the United States he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) and the Socialist Party. A supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, Larkin was arrested during the 1919 Red Scare and sentenced to hard labor at Sing Sing. There he was visited by Charlie Chaplin who described the prison as "grimly medieval," and wondered "what fiendish brain could conceive of building such horrors."
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