Oddly enough we all assume that behind prison walls there is an element of misery and gloom to all the prisoners who are incarcerated there. In San Quentin Giants, by Clayton Worfolk, we see a different side of prison life that doesn’t portray the convicted murderers as harshly as most modern movies or documentaries.
I give San Quentin Giants a big thumbs up. In this short movie that thoroughly uses scene, lighting, space and characters to take viewers on a walk through the incarcerated world that unexpectedly hits your conceptions of a maximum security prison right out of the ball park. In this film baseball is used as a way to help prisoners cope with daily and lifetimes of stress caused by incarceration in San Quentin Prison.
This short
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Hardened criminals, young and old, described the way baseball within the walls of the prison changed the way they felt about their lives. They all seemed to have almost a gleam in their eyes as they talked about the sport of baseball and wore the San Quentin A’s or Giants uniforms. Of the prisoners portrayed, Frankie Smith, Inmate Skipper, is shown caring for the field and expresses his life in the prison as a “growing experience”. He is the oldest of the group that narrated the film and his views on the baseball program included comments like, “Baseball is American, Baseball is apple pie”. He also expresses that it is hard to explain the memories. He says how he cherishes both the memories from the past and present. He also feels like baseball gave a sense of relief in the stress of the prison and gave opportunities to enjoy something. Others thought baseball gave the inmates a sense of “family and camaraderie”. Even others inmates went on to say they were “happy, that their lives were better”. I felt the film portrayed the emotions of the inmates well through using the images from within the cell block to outside taking care of the field and even had images of teammates gathering from their various cell blocks out onto the field for