Miguel Piñero wrote the script for this film version of his award winning play, written while the Puerto Rican-born Piñero was serving a five-year stretch in Sing Sing for armed robbery. The story moves from the daily social interactions among prisoners to a jarring disruption with the appearance of a new inmate, known as "short eyes," the prison epithet for a child molester. Short Eyes goes beyond prison melodrama to a challenging, chilling portrait of a dehumanized society in which violence cannot be explained away by sociological theories.