The Thin Blue Line (1988), directed by Errol Morris (not to be confused with the mediocre Rowan Atkinson BBC comedy). Criterion Collection at home, Monday, March 27.

When I first saw The Thin Blue Line at East Lansing’s Odeon Cinema, it just blew my mind, and I think it really cemented–along with the incarceration of a colleague and murder of a friend, both in the early 90s–my deep frustration about the criminal justice system in America. I currently volunteer as a mentor for the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and donate, and maybe someday will volunteer for, The Great North Innocence Project.

Though I do wish more people would watch The Thin Blue Line, and, even better, that they would watch it and be angered enough by it do want to do something about the criminal justice system, I also wish they’d watch it just to see a damn good movie. Morris’ documentaries are just so compelling and weird, they’re fabulous.

(NOTE: I also think this about the incredible documentary OJ: Made in America. You should watch it because of what it says about America, but you should also set that aside and watch it because you’ll be riveted.)

But I’ll leave you with this: there’s a point where Randall Dale Adams, the subject of the film, a man falsely accused, imprisoned, and sentenced to death row (and later exonerated) for the murder of a police officer, mentions that when he got to Dallas, Texas, his mother warned him, “If there was ever a hell on earth, it’s Dallas County.”

Then, in his resigned and dry voice, he adds, “And she was right. She was right.”

Whenever I hear Dallas invoked, either in football or, say, at an estate sale where a guy who just moved from there tells me it’s the “estate sale capital of the world” and that Janice and I should vacation there just for that purpose, I hear Randall Dale Adams saying “If there was ever a hell on earth…”