Short Eyes

Miguel Piñero wrote it in Sing Sing. I watched it after twenty-six years. Nothing had moved.

It’s Friday night. I’m on the lanai, coming down from the day. Smoke from the Canadian fires has drifted this far south and gone strange in the sky. The moon is an orange crescent. I’m decompressing the way I always have, by writing. This is how I find my way out of the dark rabbit holes.

Today I watched Short Eyes (1977) for the first time. It’s a film. A young white man comes into a New York City jail accused of molesting a child. The men on the tier work out what to do with him. They shot it inside the Tombs, the real Manhattan House of Detention, over three months. Not a set. I’ve been in places like that.

It triggered me. Movies don’t usually do that to me. This one is so real I couldn’t look away. It’s free on YouTube. Watch it. But be warned: there’s violence, sexual assault, and brutality in it, and it might get to you whether you’ve been inside or not.

Doran Larson handed me Miguel Piñero years ago. The Attica Writers Workshop started November 13, 2006, and every week Doran walked in with a tote bag full of books. He knew what each of the thirteen of us was reading. That was back when a volunteer could still walk a bag of books through the gate. You can’t now. The drugs come in on paper, K2 and the synthetics sprayed on a page, so they stopped letting paper in at all. Piñero came up in that room, next to Piri Thomas and Donald Goines, men who wrote from inside or close to it. I knew the names. I felt like I was in conversation with them, one prison writer to another. But I never saw the film. You didn’t get to watch a thing like that in there. So Piñero stayed a name I respected and hadn’t met.

He wrote Short Eyes as a play in Sing Sing in the early seventies. It won two Obies and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. The film came after he got out. I watched it after I got out. Fifty years sit between his release and my iPad.

Piñero never made it to the premiere. He’d been arrested again on an armed robbery charge, and the movie opened without him. It be like that sometimes. They paid him forty thousand dollars for the film. He gave it away, to homeless friends and men he’d done time with, and went back to living on the street. He ran his business from a pay phone. Ya tú sabe.

Piñero had an ear. I came home last October after twenty-six years. From November 1999 to last fall, the language he caught on that film barely moved. “Cupcakes,” Tito Goya’s character, tries to buy into a card game on credit, cigarettes he’ll have later in the week, and the man at the table tells him money on the wood make the game go good. I heard that my whole bid. On the lockout. On the med run. On the chow. On the lock-in. The Five Percenters, the Gods and Earths, the god bodies inside right now sound exactly like they do in a movie from 1977.

Even the title is a lesson in how the language lives. In the play and the film, short eyes is what they call the man who likes children. A child molester. A pedophile. Old prison slang, and Piñero didn’t invent it, he carried it out into the world. But the same two words meant something else too, in the movie and in my years both. Short eyes were the fuck books. The porno mags. A guy would point to something taped to his wall, a Playboy, a pinup, and that was a short eyes. Same words. Two meanings. Depending on the yard and the decade.

Every line pulled up a face. A piece of slang would land and there were three or four men behind it, guys I did time with, saying the exact thing. I spent the better part of today down in it.

I saw myself all over that film. Not only in the parts I’d want to claim. Sometimes I stood next to a man. Sometimes that just meant eating with him, breaking bread where people could see, telling the room he was all right. In a place built to isolate you, that small thing carries. But I saw myself in the flinching too. The watching. The times I did nothing.

And I saw the guards, complicit then and complicit now. In my mid-twenties, in Attica, a guard told me to kick a man down the steps. They said he was a pedophile. I didn’t do it. Someone did. Someone always does. That’s not a glitch in the machine. That’s the machine.

Fifty years, and none of it has changed. The slang, the hierarchy, the violence, the men running the tier and the men running the state. I keep coming back to a simple thing. If any other public system failed this completely for this long, we would have shut it down. We keep this one open. I don’t have a grand plan. I know we close them, one at a time.

I’m back on the lanai. The smoke is still drifting. The moon is still orange. And I do what I’ve always done when a day sits on me. I go to the books. Except now I don’t wait on a volunteer to bring them in, or a censor in the package room deciding whether I get to keep it. I find the literature the old-fashioned way. I hit the mic on my iPhone, ask Perplexity, and it hands me the exact links. Tonight I go looking for more Piñero and find a poem I’ve never read. It lands like a gift, all bravado and Lower East Side swagger, a man planting his feet and daring you to look, wearing his sins and his prison time like a crown.

“So here I am, look at me I stand proud as you can see pleased to be from the Lower East a street fighting man a problem of this land I am the Philosopher of the Criminal Mind a dweller of prison time a cancer of Rockefeller’s ghettocide this concrete tomb is my home.”

—from “A Lower East Side Poem,” Outlaw: The Collected Works of Miguel Piñero (Arte Público Press)

Adam Roberts is a writer and artist. He came home in 2025 after twenty-six years inside. Author of Concrete Carnival, 2026 Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow, and the one keeping the notes here.

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