SKIN: The Movie; and Reforming Sex Offender Laws

SKIN: The Movie

In the recently-released 2019 movie SKIN, skinhead Bryon Widner’s body is covered in racist tattoos, each marking a hate crime he committed. His parents Shareen and Fred Hammer Krager, run a kind of camp that recruits and trains young men “often lost and hungry” to become white supremacists.

Bryon meets and falls in love with single mother Julie Price. When he begins to realize he wants to give up his hateful habits, he faces a host of difficulties, one of which is the long and painful process of removing many of the hate tattoos that cover his body.

The film follows writer-director Guy Nattivs Oscar-winning short film of the same name. In the narrative version, actor Mike Colter plays the films true hero, Daryle Lamont Jenkins, who has devoted his life to helping people escape neo-Nazi groups.

Guest ” Daryle Lamont Jenkins, founder of One Peoples Project, is able to join us in the studio today. Since 1988 Daryle has been documenting and writing about right wing individuals and organizations even back while he was serving as a police officer in the U.S. Air Force. In 2000, he founded One Peoples Project out of a counter-protest to a rally in Morristown, NJ. The organization quickly gained the reputation of publicly documenting hate groups and their activities.

Reforming Sex Offender Laws

The U.S. legal system and sentencing practices rely too often on emotion rather than facts when it comes to defendants with developmental disabilities charged with sex offenses. Sentences for possessing child pornography are severe, and don’t take into account a defendants lack of awareness or inability to understand the societal values being punished. This is true for individuals on the autism spectrum whose social intelligence quotient may lag their intelligence quotient.

Two professors want to change these laws, St. Francis College professor Emily Horowitz and co-editor and law professor Larry Dubin make the case for reform in their book Caught in the Web of the Criminal Justice System: Autism, Developmental Disabilities, and Sex Offenses.


Guest ” Professor Emily Horowitz discusses her book and work related to sex offender laws in the United States. Dr. Horowitz is chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at St. Francis. She is the author of Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us and founder and co-director of the St. Francis Post-Prison program. Her research on the sex offense registry been widely cited.

“””””””””


Share This Episode