Becoming Whole Again

Filmed at New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, What I Want My Words To Do To You documentary focuses on the women prisoners who participated in a writing workshop taught by playwright Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues [1996]). Over the course of four years, the filmmakers recorded what occurred as the women shared their responses to writing prompts from Ensler. The workshop participants featured in the film are not typical of female offenders in that the majority of them have committed and/or been accomplices to offenses that resulted in the deaths of the victims. Only two of the featured women were serving sentences for drug-related crimes. Diverse in background and ethnicity, the participants included several high-profile prisoners: Judith Clark and Kathy Boudin were members of the Weather Underground, a radical organization from the 1970s. Clark and Boudin participated in a Brinks robbery that resulted in the deaths of three men. Pamela Smart, a former teacher sentenced to life without parole for her involvement in the murder of her husband by her teenage lover, was also a member of the group. The paths that brought these three middle-class white women to prison were radically different from those of Betty Harris, a large black woman with multiple health problems, who killed her mother, or Keila Pulinario, who, at the age of 21, shot her best friend after he raped her and threatened to do it again, or Cynthia Berry, who became a prostitute and drug user and killed one of her “johns,” a 71-year-old man, by stabbing him multiple times.

The length and structure of the documentary—less than 90 minutes with cutting back and forth between workshop sessions and the preparation for a performance of the women’s work by well-known actors (Mary Alice, Glenn Close, Hazelle Goodman, Rosie Perez, and Marisa Tomei)—means that the audience may not be fully conscious of the passage of time within the workshop. The film moves back and forth from the pre-performance read-throughs by the actors with Ensler there to provide information and explanation to the classroom writing workshop sessions in which the group members take turns reading what they have written in response to the prompts from Ensler. We hear their words being echoed by the actors during the read-throughs and during the benefit performance. There is an interweaving of present and future.

But in the workshop sessions, the women themselves tackle time—their pasts, their presents, their futures—in multiple ways. One of the most poignant is the discussions that ensue in response to various readings about the length of their sentences and the reality of their lives in prison. These discussions occur from the perspectives of participants who are at various stages in the process of acknowledging their crimes and accepting responsibility for the deaths of their victims and the harm done to survivors and their own families. For example, during one exercise, Cynthia Berry reads the letter she has written to her former mother-in-law who became a substitute for her own mother. In the letter, Berry lays bare her anguish and guilt about a victim—a 71-year-old man who had recently lost his wife and was a father and grandfather. She describes how she was never able to move past her own sexual abuse by her uncle, and that when she killed her victim, she was turning all of the rage she felt toward men on him. She describes guilt so intense that she feels she has no right to be happy and that she should pay for her victim’s death with her own death. Other members of the group tell her that she has to move beyond her guilt and find a way to give back. Roslyn Smith, who will be featured in another scene, reminds Berry that Berry has expressed interest in working in the puppy program at Bedford Hills that allows selected...