Sleepers by Barry Levinson deals with the most brutal forms of juvenile delinquency, and as a matter of fact takes the most ugly turn in course of time. Everyone is asked to watch sleepers so as to be cautious of the penalties of the future. The film revolves around the lives of four childhood friends Shakes, Tommy, Michael, and John who do live in Hell's kitchen, New York City in the mid –1960s, and to their own assessment the ethnically-mixed working class neighborhood happens to be a "place of innocence ruled by corruption." Though neither of the boys were ludicrous, yet a slight prank about the Greek hot dog vendor on their part changed the whole lot. Found guilty of reckless endangerment, Tommy, Michael and John are sentenced to 12 to 18 months and Shakes was sentenced to 6 to 12 months at the Wilkinson Home for Boys in upstate New York; the judge tells them that it was only Father Bobby's intervention that kept them from a longer and harsher sentence. We, when we do watch sleepers can feel about their innocence, but how could the judge? Upon arriving to the Wilkinson home, they realize that they are not as fit for prison as the rest of the kids there. As described in the novel, the majority of the offenders happen to be of rugged natures. But if compare with them, these four do not belong to a street gang and were seen in their neighborhood as relatively good kids whom the adults, many of whom served time in these facilities, did not think would ever end up in prison. Thus they soon became an easy prey to the guards, and getting abused by them depending on their whims. If you even watch sleepers, a new meaning of jail life will be exposed to you! Such is the level of crime that at one night the four guards take them to the basement where they engage in the gang rape of the four boys as an assertion of power and authority over the youths.Throughout their stay, the guards continue to abuse them and other inmates physically and sexually, often while drunk, over any possible infraction. Th best scene in this respect can be rated, when a team of inmates to play them in a touch football game, the four are selected and think that they can use this as an opportunity to get back at the guards physically. The selection of Rizzo, a fearsome Black inmate on the team whom the guards tend to avoid, to lead the team in assaulting the guards during the game. This goes through and the inmates win but the guards out of revenge toss them into solitary confinement and kill Rizzo as they are locked away. During the remainder of their stay, they are left hopeless and fear every night during which they stay at Wilkinson. Shakes is the first one released after serving ten months.
The next part of the movie when do we watch sleepers suddenly jumps forward to 1981, when John and Tommy are turned to gangsters and Mikey is an assistant District Attorney and arranges to be assigned to the case, secretly intending to lose as a means of getting revenge on the Wilkinson home. In a brief epilogue, it's revealed that after the trial, John and Tommy return to their lives of street crime, and both die violently within a few years of the trial. The last part of the movie gets rvealed, when Mikey, stigmatized by the D.A.'s office for losing an apparently open-and-shut case, resigns, and stops practicing law, eventually moving to England to live alone in the countryside. Shakes remains in New York, and becomes a full-time writer. Carol also remains in New York, where she becomes a single mother to a son she names after all four of her childhood friends.