This is a clip from my 1972 documentary concert feature film starring BB King and Joan Baez among others. I went into Sing Sing Prison, New York's famous maximum-security prison, to teach a class on writing and theater. After a year, the Warden gave me and my partner permission to create a concert and to film it. The inmates who took the class wrote this play which tells the story of an innocent man. My experience is that some of the inmates who I knew in the joint admitted to their crimes than others didn't. I worked with some inmates who were likely innocent and some who, based on my interactions with them, were clearly guilty and I was glad and felt safer with them behind bars.
This prison concert and performance took place on Thanksgiving day. We didn't know whether our planned concert and film would actually take place until it did. I hired seven great documentary film cameramen directors as my colleagues in each of them followed one of the stories that took place that day. If you search the words "sing sing" on my YouTube channel, you will find various portions of the feature documentary film that I created from the footage.
One of the inmates who took the class was Miguel Pinero who later became a well-known playwright writing the famous production Short Eyes.
