John Moore | Turns out, 'These Walls' CAN talk

Ed Caley stood before a sold-out house at the Sie FilmCenter on Monday and told a harrowing story that was as powerful as anything that could ever be committed to film.

The year was 1987. Caley was 6. His dad was a visiting sergeant at Shadow Mountain Correctional Facility in Canon City. “While my father was working in the visiting room, he was brutally assaulted, stomped within an inch of his life and left lying in a pool of his own blood,” Caley told a hushed room. The boy’s mother was called and told her husband had died – because the hospital staff was certain he had. Young Ed and his brother were traumatized, as you would expect.

Nothing else in this story you would expect. 

Ed’s father not only lived, he returned to work. “And he spent the rest of his career as an advocate for humanity in the prison facilities and for treating incarcerated people with dignity and respect,” said Caley, who is himself now the warden of the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Canon City, Colorado’s oldest prison at 151 years old. 

“I can’t help but think that if we had more of these kinds of programs back then, that assault might not have happened – and I might not have had to endure the thought of losing my father as a 6-year-old kid,” Caley said. “That’s why this film is so important to me.”

The program Caley mentioned is the University of Denver Prison Arts Initiative, which exists to bring power and purpose to residents of the state’s 21 correctional facilities through creative and collaborative learning experiences. That includes recently launching the nation’s first statewide prison radio station, a newspaper, a podcast and staging theatrical plays.

The film that had just been screened at the Sie FilmCenter is called “These Walls,” a remarkable cooperative effort that uses creative writing, music, dance and theater to tell a story taken from a nugget of the prison’s true history: The recent discovery that the mother of the prison’s first warden secretly wrote to the men on Death Row, sometimes over years, reassuring them of their humanity and value as human beings as they prepared to die.

Those letters have been lost to time, so director Clare Hammoor, working with Eric Davis – himself recently freed after 34 years behind bars – set out to create an original film written and performed by 16 inmates at the facility. They developed the script over a months-long creative writing class, then turned that into the 35-minute film, which opens with five musicians in the prison yard performing a cover of The Band’s “I Shall Be Released” that would be worthy of an audience at Red Rocks. Acclaimed Denver dancer Tara Rynders plays the warden’s mother, Susan, with the incarcerated cast members reading the words of a collective Death Row prisoner named John.

The audience at Monday’s highly charged premiere screening was a mix of prison officials and members of the local legal community eating popcorn side by side with former incarcerated residents of the Colorado Territorial prison, along with friends and families of the incarcerated men who made the film. They came not only to see their loved ones perform, but to actually interact with them during a remarkable live virtual talkback that beamed a video feed of the cast back at the prison onto the massive Sie FilmCenter screen. It felt, oddly and appropriately, not unlike any talkback after any screening you might see at the Denver Film Festival.

And it happened only because, in a simple act of grace, humanity and basic decency, Colorado Department of Corrections Executive Director Dean Williams allowed these men to have this brief moment in time where they were acknowledged and admired for the art they had created.

“Hey, that’s just the way we roll in DOC now,” said Williams.

This is a new day in the Colorado correctional system. One that began when Williams arrived three years ago with a plan to radically change the way things have been done in Colorado’s prisons for 150 years.

“We’ve gotten this correctional system so wrong in this country,” Williams said. “Tonight is about a film, but it’s about so much more. It’s about the men and women who live and work behind these walls, offering a vision for how this whole thing can be different.” 

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Williams’ larger goal is to normalize the everyday prison experience as much as possible in the simple belief that more humanity means better results. He believes that by giving the incarcerated a daily purpose, a real education, an artistic outlet and providing them with real-world skills, they will be far more likely to successfully adapt to the outside world if and when they get out – which, in turn, dramatically reduces the likelihood of recidivism.

Imagine the smiles and tears as family members, many with small children in tow, watched their loved ones perform in the film, then interacted with them afterward by video.

One by one, they stood and offered both their love and insight into the toll that incarceration takes on those on the outside. One man stood and greeted his son, a musician in the film. “I am a 72-year-old man, and I love my son very much,” he said. “We’re going to have coffee one day, but until that happens, I am incarcerated, too. My number is his number – 108477.”

One mother stood and thanked the film’s creative team for humanizing people who are in prison. In turn, the men back at the prison took full accountability for their crimes and the trauma they have inflicted – and tried to explain how making art is helping them to come to terms with the damage they have done.

“This has been a major part of our healing process,” said cast member Tim Wakefield. “I have come to realize that the harm that I caused becomes someone’s suffering – and that suffering was always my suffering also. I am hoping through this work that our healing becomes healing for all.”

The idea that turned into “These Walls” began a year ago when Warden Caley asked DU Prison Arts Initiative founder Ashley Hamilton’s team to create a performance that marked Colorado Territorial’s 150-year history. Williams admits his first reaction to that idea was: “I want to forget about the first 140.” Those years included a rock quarry, license plates, the infamous cannibal Alferd Packer and 120 years of executions. 

“Old Max” as it is known, has been here since before Colorado was a state. Since then, one of the largest state and federal prison complexes in the world has grown around it. On its website, Fremont County touts itself as “Colorado's Correctional Capitol,” housing more than 7,000 state and federal prisoners. That’s more than the populations of 340 Colorado towns. 

A simple history of Old Max, Hammoor said, would not do. Instead, Hamilton added: “The film should attempt to acknowledge both the 150 years of harm that has taken place inside, but also the hope for the future of what could be – in a really honest way.”

Kristen Nelson, who served for years as a criminal public defender for the state, called “These Walls” an important film “because it communicates that no one is beyond redemption,” she said. “Everyone is human, and everyone is capable of change.”

A mother who visited Old Max during the filming said she witnessed that change on both her son and prison officers. “I was overwhelmed with joy seeing these men working together,” she said. “I saw camaraderie, respect, accomplishment and togetherness. And for the officers, this is not just work for them. It’s in their hearts.”

Cast member Juan Candelaria thanked his director “for allowing us to have a voice, for treating us equally, and for helping us all to grow and prosper into a man our families would be proud of – and our communities will be able to accept.”

At that point, Rory Robinson, who was released in July 2019 when his life sentence was commuted after 29 years, stood before the imprisoned men on the screen and told them: “You guys have had your fight with your inner bad guy … but it looks like you won.”

Candelaria called this new direction for the prison system a new generation for incarcerated men and women. Wendy Rosen, a Captain in the Department of Corrections, said: “I have been waiting 22 years to see this kind of progress. I am so thankful that we are changing course."

Williams assured everyone present there is no going back to the way things were before.

“We are burning the ships,” he said. “We are not sailing back to England. That’s how it has to be.

“There is a better way forward, and tonight is one more stake in the ground.”