The Sing Sing Files

2024 marked the 50th anniversary of mass incarceration. Throughout those fifty years a great deal has been published on the system, the players, the victims, and the wrongs perpetuated in the interest of “justice.” There has been relatively too little, however, written on wrongful conviction, and even less that goes as deeply into the institutions, processes, and biases that shape bad outcomes in the criminal justice system as Dan Slepian's The Sing Sing Files: One Journalist, Six Innocent Men, and a Twenty-Year Fight for Justice. This is a riveting and provocative contribution that points up the extraordinary harms caused by false imprisonment and wrongful convictions.

Slepian's journey to these insights is a sort of coming-of-age narrative, of the opening of the author's (and others') eyes to the dark side of justice. After his twenty-year experience helping to investigate cases and exonerate six men, he is still searching for a “genuine safeguard against injustice.” While the substance of the narrative is truly compelling and infuriating, Slepian's conclusion, that “the safeguard...is us” (196) is slightly unsatisfying and feels more pat than expected from the full sweep of the story he's told.

Much of the book is a procedural: police, prosecutors, media. But the procedural narratives are often inverted to focus on how the innocent are brought to extreme injustice, and Slepian explores several important themes. For example, he draws clear portraits of the ways that evidentiary issues go awry, including for example, the extraordinary problems with eyewitness reliability. He points to eyewitness misidentification as the leading cause of wrongful convictions (104), and describes multiple factors that feed into unreliability, such as bias, police pressures (during interrogations, at mugshot reviews, and lineups), and general issues with memory. He also addresses the cycle of incarceration, in which kids with parents in prison have a higher likelihood of going to prison themselves, and asks how we can bear – let along justify – such a consequence for kids of wrongfully incarcerated individuals. Slepian is careful to clarify that the problem is a systemic one; it is “more than just incompetent or malevolent police and prosecutors; it's a failure of our collective will to hold people in power accountable.”

Throughout, Slepian pairs expected practices with actual practices, as recorded in notes, documents, video and audio recordings, trial transcripts, and other sources. These juxtapositions are an effective tool for driving thoughtful engagement, and his characters (and their arcs) add not just believability, but gravitas and authenticity to the process stories and the shared sense of discovering the deep, intractable reality of injustice in the criminal justice system. Among these characters are police, such as Bobby Addolorato, lawyers, including Steven Cohen, and family members of the men wrongfully convicted and imprisoned. The coming-of-age revelations of the truth of injustice are a linchpin that unites everyone in a kind of state of disbelief. Even after twenty years, Slepian seems to still feel that disbelief. Perhaps this undergirds his hope in the collective us and the possibility of righting the ship.

The Sing Sing Files is a timely and serious analysis of the failures and consequences of the American criminal justice system and the tragic legacy of mass incarceration. The waste of time, money, and lives shows the inhuman side of the system but leaves the way forward unresolved. This is a needed addition to the literature and helps with necessary awareness raising (as Slepian's related Dateline broadcasts have done), but the paradigm shift is still in the wings.