The stamp depicts a person or setting featured in the various scenes. The video opens with cameos featuring Danny Glover, Louis Gossett, Jr., and Jimmy Smits reading letters which set the tone for the video. These letters express sadness, despair, and resignation. The first section opens with scenes from an arrest as background for those letters which focus on the embarrassment, terror, and regret experienced by a person being arrested. Scenes and letters from the booking sequence emphasize the individual's loss of identity as well as the impersonal nature of the jail.
Selections focus on the arrestee's loss of control, anxiety, and denial.
The juvenile hall portion of the video highlights the regret that the inmates experience, and this is most tellingly expressed in their efforts to warn others to avoid the mistakes that they have made. The juvenile prisons that are presented in the second section, much like the juvenile detention hall, resemble prisons with their bars and solid steel doors on the cells and rooms. This section opens with an interview that explores the fear experienced by a young man as he enters a secure facility for delinquent youth. Other letters in the sequence revisit the themes of regret, absence of physical safety, and feelings of depression while additional themes that touch on home sickness and the consequences of drug use are also developed. Gang involvement, both in the prison and in the community, is a primary focal point for much of the latter portion of the sequence.