They Call Us Monsters (2016) is a documentary about juveniles in California who were charged as adults for their crimes, facing sentences of life without parole. The film focuses on a screenwriting workshop at the Barry J. Nidorf juvenile detention hall in Los Angeles, offered by Gabriel Cowan, producer of the film. Four inmates sign up for the program, and collectively write a screenplay inspired by their life experiences, which was performed for the inmates by professional actors during the workshop. The inmates coached the actors and gave them personal input so that they could portray the characters as they were written. While the film shows the human side of the young offenders, and the circumstances in their personal lives that led them on the path to incarceration, it does not shy away from the very real impact their crimes had on the victims. A woman who was paralyzed from the waist down after being attacked by one of the juvenile offenders expresses her feelings of grief, and her desire for her attacker to be punished for his crime, but not for the rest of his life.
It also documents the legal quagmires these four young men face in having their day in court, and in one case, shows you what “ineffective counsel” looks like. In September of 2013, California governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 260 into law, which enabled inmates who were sentenced to life as juveniles to be allowed parole hearings after serving ten years. All states in the U.S. are allowed to prosecute juveniles as adults, and 32 states allow for juveniles to be sentenced to life imprisonment. The United States is the only country that sentences juveniles to life without parole.
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