Thoughts on Troop 1500

At the beginning of the film, someone (I didn't catch who) made the comment that the mothers had done a lot of "selfish things." I guess that comment kind of caught me off guard, because it seemed very judgmental and pejorative, since at the time that it was said, we didn't know what the mothers had done or under what types of circumstances, and it didn't seem like something that you would expect to hear in a documentary like this. As the film went on, some of the daughters and the family members used the same or similar terminology, and some of the mothers said the same things about themselves. While I still found the term problematic, it put it in a better context for me.

This is probably just me being naive, but some of the sentences seemed pretty heavy for the crimes that were committed. (I think one woman got up to 25 years for either possession or possession with intent to sell.) I hadn't realized that the penalties for drug possession were that long. It seems like there are people who commit murder (and not the kind that the nurse, Susan, was in jail for) who get out with less.

Susan's situation was kind of problematic for me. She was in prison for euthanizing a patient (she received a sentence of 50 years). In some states this would be perfectly legal, and yet here she is being made to feel like "the worst person in the world." Some could argue that she was trying to help the patients and eased their suffering. While we don't know all of the particulars of her or any of the women's stories, it sounded like she did what she thought was best at the time. [And as Julia asked in class, How do you judge between her situation and that of a mother who sold drugs to take care of her family, with the same mindset that she was doing what she thought was best at the time?]