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Curating Crime and Punishment: What 10 Images Reveal About American Justice
Filmmaker Lynn Novick sifted through thousands of historical images to create her upcoming documentary series on the American justice system.
By Jamiles Lartey
Library of Congress; National Archives and Records Administration; Getty Images; Eddie Adams/Associated Press; Joliet Area Historical Museum
Q&A ·
Filed<br>08.06.2026 6:00 a.m. EDT
For Lynn Novick, photographs offer a window into the past that the written record cannot quite replicate. They’re “evidence of something that existed in front of the camera” at the moment the shutter clicked, the documentarian told me recently.
At the same time, photographs are not entirely neutral; someone chose where to stand, what to include and what to leave out. This tension is one of many we touched on in a recent conversation on the imagery of crime and punishment that Americans have been creating and preserving for centuries.
Novick, her partner Ken Burns and their team encountered roughly 16,000 such images in the process of producing a forthcoming documentary on the history of the American justice system, whittling it down to nearly 1,400 images that made it into the four-part series.
We asked Novick to look closely at 10 images from that archive and share thoughts on what they can tell us about the system, the people who’ve encountered it, and ourselves in the process. The Q&A that follows has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Image 1
A mugshot of Lee Wong, circa 1907.
Clara Sheldon Smith, from “Prisoners” by Arne Svenson
A mugshot of Claude F. Hankins, circa 1904.
Clara Sheldon Smith, from “Prisoners” by Arne Svenson
How did these very unique mug shots — very different from what people generally expect — come to be?
Lynn Novick: So, these photographs were taken by a woman named Clara Sheldon Smith in a town called Marysville, California, right around 1900. She was a professional photographer with a studio. So people could go there for a wedding portrait or family portraits. And for reasons that we don’t quite understand, the town of Marysville hired her to photograph people who were arrested.
By this time, most police departments would photograph people when they were arrested, but she didn’t take the pictures of these people the way they would have been taken if they were taken in the jail. They were brought to her studio so they now have, in a sense, the same relationship to the camera as anyone else who is getting their picture taken. And that shows in the way that she photographed them with an enormous amount of humanity and dignity.
What’s the value in seeing mug shots this way?
So in the film we showed some of the pictures without seeing what the person was accused of. Then sometimes we would add it. We thought it was interesting to have ourselves and our audience just think whatever they would normally think when you see a picture of someone … and then see what they’ve been charged with. And then you have to kind of think about the relationship between those two things.
Image 2
The Japanese American Mochida family awaiting a bus in Hayward, Calif., to an internment camp, in 1942. Their items, and some of the children, have paper tags attached for identification.<br>National Archives and Records Administration
Why was it important to include internment in this film about the history of crime and punishment?
We put it in because it raises a lot of questions about what is a crime, and who is a criminal. These are people essentially being incarcerated, not because of something they’ve done or a crime they’ve committed but because of who they are.
There’s a dignity in that photograph. And I wonder, when you’re selecting photographs to tell a story, how do you think about, on the one hand, the value in showing people’s dignity and their humanity, but on the other hand, not letting the abject cruelty sort of slink by us, because there’s something so visually almost normal about an image like this — at least until you notice that the children are literally tagged.
We think a lot about how much time we spend on a picture like this. How we frame it, what music you’re listening to, what we’re...