Dan Protess is a documentary filmmaker whose new feature In Their Hands follows the parole case of Ronnie Carrasquillo. In 1976, when Ronnie was 18, he killed a Chicago police officer. He’s been locked up ever since. The documentary focuses on whether the parole board in Illinois will finally grant his release. That board has considered and rejected Ronnie’s case 30 previous times. I attended two of those hearings in Springfield myself, as part of my reporting for my book Correction and podcast The Parole Room. But in Illinois, people up for parole aren’t allowed to attend their own hearings. So even though I had watched the board debate the crime and Ronnie’s five decades in prison, I didn’t see or hear Ronnie there. 

Who was Ronnie when you met him in prison?

In Ronnie, you’ve got a deeply religious, 65-year-old man who’s mentoring incarcerated children via WebEx while he’s in prison. I mean, he is clearly someone who’s so well positioned to benefit our society. And in fact, the Illinois State Constitution says that the purpose of punishment is to restore someone to useful citizenship. 

That’s right. 

And it immediately became apparent to me that he knew absolutely everything about the politics and the law, and can cite the state Constitution, chapter and verse, and was extremely aware of the forces that were working behind the scenes to keep him incarcerated.

How did the parole board view him? 

They saw him as a crime, as a series of actions that he took as an 18-year-old in 1976. They weren’t taking into account the mountain of evidence that showed that there was no way he could have intended to kill a police officer. And I think you only have to go to the scene of the crime and get a visual of the distance away to realize that it’s preposterous that an 18-year-old, in the middle of the night, standing that far away from a huge crowd, could have possibly picked out a plainclothes police officer in a crowd and intended to kill him. Why does the board continue to overlook that? I think partially that just speaks to the makeup of the board, which was populated fairly heavily by law enforcement types. 

I wonder, even you saying all that about the crime scene and how far away he was in 1976, aren’t you also arguing about the original crime rather than anything else Ronnie has done since then? Who he is now?

It’s impossible not to go down that alley about what happened that night. When I tell someone I’m making this film, the first question is not, “Has the guy rehabilitated himself?” The question is always, “What did he do?” But I think it’s pretty critical then to move past that and to ask larger questions about the purpose of incarceration and whether it’s all about retribution and punishment, or whether there is room for rehabilitation.

Ronnie is Puerto Rican, from Humboldt Park, and his family has come to support him at his parole hearings. More supporters than I’ve seen at any hearing I’ve attended. Tell me more about his family, because they’re really a big part of the story you tell.

His sister Deyra, in particular, is an absolutely remarkable person. When a member of the family is incarcerated, it tears a lot of families apart, and she was kind of the glue that held them together, partially through love and partially through just being a communicator. She maintained a bond with Ronnie despite the fact he was in prison for so many years. And I just found that to be so moving and powerful.

You brought up earlier this enormous societal question: What’s the purpose of incarceration? Here you have Ronnie, who admits to committing a murder, whether it was intentional or not. And he agrees that he should be punished. But then there’s this other question: What should that punishment be? For how long? And that’s the fascinating thing about parole boards. That’s what they’re wrestling with. That’s what they decide. How were your ideas of punishment changed by working on this?

Ronnie likes to talk about when you buy a Thanksgiving turkey, it comes with a little plastic thermometer in it, so when you put it in the oven, it pops up when it’s ready. And he said that at some point, he went before the parole board and told them, “My thermometer popped. I’m ready.” And I guess, if you were to try to develop a perfect parole system, or a perfect justice system, you would be able to figure out exactly when that thermometer popped, and that person would be released that day. Obviously, we don’t live in a perfect world, and we can’t design a perfect justice system, but I would say if there is a goal, it’s to figure out when someone is ready. I guess when that person is ready leads to a whole other set of questions. Is it about when they’re rehabilitated? Is it about when they’re no longer a danger to society, or is it when we as a society feel like we have inflicted enough pain on them. And I guess if it’s a question about inflicting pain and retribution, then we’re talking about a totally different system.

As you know, parole in Illinois was abolished in 1978, so only people like Ronnie, who were convicted of crimes prior to 1978, still come up before a parole board. And yet, we have all these people in prison today who aren’t eligible for parole and who want it restored in the state. What do you want viewers to leave this documentary thinking about parole? Should they want to bring the system back? 

I think it’s pretty clear to most viewers that we need to create some space for someone in prison to evolve, and once they’ve evolved for their case to be heard again. And if we agree that people need a second chance, what does that second chance look like? And as much as I prefer to be a journalist and not an advocate, I’m willing to say that the current parole board just is not working. It’s broken. So the question then is, do you disband this parole board and create a new one? Do you entirely go to judicial review, as they have elsewhere? I don’t know, that’s above my pay grade.

You have this beautiful moment when Ronnie’s sister Deyra says that the board members need to spend just 10 minutes with her brother to see what a great guy he is and deserving of another chance. Your viewers are going to get like 72 minutes with him. What are they going to learn about him in that time? 

Ronnie is a deep reader of texts. Those texts being the Illinois State Constitution, the U.S. Constitution and the Bible. And he finds in all of those documents a through-line, which is restoration. Jesus was about restoring human beings. If their eyes didn’t work, Jesus would restore their eyes. If they had a broken hand, Jesus would restore their hand. And Ronnie sees in the Constitution a provision for restoring people to useful citizenship. And he believes that the current system is in need of its own kind of restoration, that we have forgotten as a Judeo-Christian nation and a believer in laws, we’ve forgotten about our mandate to forgive and restore.

In Their Hands airs on WTTW on December 27 at 9 p.m. It will be available for streaming on PBS.org through the end of January.