This comprehensive discussion guide dives deep into all of the topics explored in the film. It offers questions to pose to viewers as well as sample answers and additional contextual information to enrich the conversation.
We also encourage you to check out our Screening Toolkit, which has resources for facilitating trauma-informed discussions and insights on inviting panelists who may provide additional expertise on these questions.
In 2016, Brock Turner sexually assaulted Chanel Miller as she lay unconscious on a public walkway at Stanford University, where Turner was a student. Based in part on Turner’s clean record and on the recommendation of the probation department, Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to six months incarceration in jail, three years probation, and a lifetime on the sex offender registry. The short period of incarceration, at a time when many believed those with power did not take campus sexual assault seriously, catapulted the case into the national spotlight. Activists demanded that voters recall Judge Persky. In 2018, they did just that, making Judge Persky the first California judge to be recalled in over 80 years.
Revisiting those events, this film invites the viewer to reflect upon whether the recall achieved its goal of advancing justice for survivors of sexual violence. The film forces us to grapple with the unintended consequences of our responses to individual cases like Turner’s, and asks whether our push for punishment in one case may cause harm to others.
The guide below poses discussion questions for the film. We also offer some ideas and responses to guide discussion. At the end, we offer suggestions for further thought and discussion about our criminal legal system and the purposes it serves, and for how to engage with your elected officials to push for better support for survivors.
The questions here progress as the film does, all building to one critical question: what should justice look like? This question is obviously extremely difficult to answer, and people grapple with it every day. The prompts below, along with the film, are designed to push us to both explore different ways that we can promote healing and accountability, and also to examine how our current system fails to meet either of these ends.
The film explores topics that are emotional and potentially triggering to people, so it can be helpful to start your post-film discussion by checking in with your audience using open-ended questions.
1. What is your reaction to the film? How is the film sitting with you? How are you doing?
2. Did the film challenge your assumptions? How?
In the beginning of the film, we listen to the incredibly brave and tragic survivor impact statement Chanel Miller gave at Brock Turner’s sentencing. Ms. Miller describes the invisible, but brutal harm that Turner’s sexual assault caused. We can only imagine how hard it was for Ms. Miller to deliver this speech in a packed courtroom.
The reality is that most people do not report sexual assault to the police, and they are often left to cope with harm from their assault alone, in silence. According to one estimate, only 310 out of every 1,000 sexual assaults are ever reported to the police.
One of the reasons so few people report sexual assault is that actors in the criminal legal system often retraumatize the survivor by repeatedly asking them to provide the most intimate and personal details of the sexual assault. Additionally, few prosecutors or police officers are equipped to engage in trauma-informed approaches and as a result, they question the survivors in an accusatory way unique to sexual assault cases. Many “victim blame” the survivor, suggesting that the survivor “asked for” their assault, especially when alcohol is involved.
The next section of this film explores the recall effort that followed Judge Persky’s sentencing of Brock Turner. Because recall proponents were motivated by outrage over what was perceived as a short sentence, both the recall and the film raise critical questions about what it means to hold someone accountable, what a “short” sentence is, and the relationship between sentencing length and rehabilitation.
The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the developed world, with a per capita incarceration rate of 664 per 100,000 people. Chile, by comparison, has an incarceration rate of 211 per 100,000 people. The United States also has much harsher sentencing laws than other countries do. 83 percent of the world’s life-without-parole population, for example, is in the United States.
There is little evidence that long prison sentences are serving many of the goals of punishment. Indeed, research shows that long prison sentences do not effectively deter people from committing crimes. And long sentences have harmful side effects, removing incentives for people to rehabilitate while in prison and taking them away from their families for so long that successful reentry is difficult.
The film goes on to explore the concept of judicial independence. In our legal system, the judge is considered a neutral arbiter who is supposed to dispassionately apply the law to the facts. The recall proponents, however, argued that when sentencing Brock Turner, the judge should have been responsive to “community values.” Under this theory, the judge is simply a reflection of those who live in the city or county or state where the judge presides.
The film explores the ways in which the media can fuel inaccurate beliefs about our legal system. Misleading reporting occurred during the Persky recall when The Guardian published a piece accusing Persky of exhibiting bias in sentencing. But the case in question was a plea bargain–in which the prosecution and defense agreed on a sentence–and Judge Persky was not the judge who accepted the final plea or imposed the sentence. Indeed, if one followed only the mainstream media coverage of the case, one would think that Perksy was biased in favor of white defendants. In truth, Perksy’s sentencing record shows no sign of bias and he tended to issue fairly lenient sentences to all defendants. By focusing on the actions of one judge in a single case, the media missed the fact that bias pervades the entire system.
Misleading reporting in the criminal justice realm is not new. Fear drives news sales and clicks more than facts, and so newspaper reporters often run with it. Coverage of a single violent incident may lead people to believe that crime rates are soaring in their community when they are actually down. It can drive racist “superpredator” myths, and it can lead to demands for pretrial incarceration of people presumed innocent. This coverage, in other words, can impact entire communities in extremely negative and serious ways.
There is no question that the criminal legal system is racist. In the US, Black Americans are imprisoned in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of white Americans. The NAACP found that “[o]ne out of every three Black boys born today can expect to be sentenced to prison, compared to 1 out 6 Latino boys; one out of 17 white boys.” How you solve that problem, however, is a matter of hot debate. In the Brock Turner case, many people insisted he should have gotten a harsher sentence, and that he only received probation because he was white. No one pushing for the recall, however, demanded that people of color receive less harsh sentences to match Brock Turner’s sentence. The recall proponents argued for ratcheting up of punishment, in other words, rather than a leveling down.
Many feminists are progressive on a range of criminal justice issues except for sexual violence. This is in part because our society has historically treated certain types of sexual violence and violence against women as non-criminal. Domestic violence and marital rape went unpunished, and powerful men inflicted harm on countless women for years without any consequences. But there is also a history of extreme punishment and lynching of Black men for mere accusations of sexual violence against white women. The entangled history of race and sexual violence in this country begs an intersectional analysis and provides an opportunity to create new ways of addressing harm without compounding systemic oppression on the basis of gender or race.
Feminists are right to be upset about society discounting or ignoring violence against women. But the supporters of the recall carried signs accusing Judge Persky of “legalizing rape,” when he issued a sentence that was within the law.
The film points out the Persky recall led to judges imposing harsher sentences across the board. Sentences increased by 30%, for example, in the six counties studied. As previously discussed, a focus on one case can often lead to an expansion of the criminal legal system. And any increase in punishment will magnify all of the preexisting racial disparities in the system. Black and brown people are arrested at much higher rates than white people, and therefore, a push toward more incarceration will likely disproportionately harm those communities.
There is a risk that this pattern of overcorrection will occur again. A series of high profile smash-and-grabs from expensive retail stores, for example, has people calling for harsher punishments for retail theft across California, a result that will probably not reduce thefts but will put more people in prison for longer. A rise in the murder rate has people clamoring for harsher sentences for gun possession, a solution that will not reduce violent crime, and will likely be enforced disproportionately against Black and brown people. The push to pass hate crime legislation in more states only leads to higher rates of incarceration and longer, enhanced sentences, an effect that may be felt disproportionately by those groups who are already over incarcerated.
Public defenders, scholars, and advocates predicted that the recall campaign would lead to higher sentences, including for people who did not look like Brock Turner.
The study, which examined sentencing outcomes in six California counties following the announcement of the recall campaign, proved them right. It found an increase of over 30% in sentence length in the 45 days following the announcement of the recall.
In total, judges gave between 88 and 403 years of additional incarceration in those 45 days in the six counties for which the authors had data. The authors estimate the total impact across all counties in California is more than five times as high (between 440 and 2442 years).
Importantly, the study’s authors controlled for whether these increases were driven by harsher recommendations by prosecutors through plea bargains, and it concluded that they were not.
The authors also examined whether the “shock” in increased sentence length could correlate to some other societal change. The authors conducted a comparative data analysis with Washington state, where judges are also elected in nonpartisan elections, but where judges are not subject to recall. The study did not find a similar increase in sentences.
The study also determined that the increase in sentencing was most pronounced for white defendants. The authors, however, noted that Black defendants are already subject to harsher charging practices – in other words, prosecutors charge Black people with more serious offenses for similar conduct than White people– and therefore, also harsher sentences writ large. The recall’s increases did nothing to mitigate preexisting, longer-term racial disparities in the justice system.
The film ends by asking a question that it does not answer. After this discussion, are you better poised to answer it?
22. How can we imagine a form of justice that does not perpetuate the harms of mass incarceration?
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