George Bush (the first) never would have won the 1988 Presidential election had Darius Clark Monroe been the subject of his campaign. Monroe is no Willie Horton, the convicted murderer who later raped a woman and assaulted her boyfriend when he was let out on parole. The “tough on crime” wave, which helped Bush clinch the presidency and accelerated the expansion of America’s prison system, is now under cinematic scrutiny in Monroe’s autobiographical documentary and directorial debut, Evolution of a Criminal. Monroe is a sensitive, eloquent young man, trying to make sense of a crime he committed as a teenager, when he spearheaded a bank robbery and came away with $140,000. But rather than blowing the money on fancy cars and clothes, he put it in a shoebox and left it on his mother’s bed, hoping it would lift the family out of debt. Family figures strongly into Monroe’s narrative, and the voices of his mother, grandmother, stepfather, and aunts shape his account of how a good kid could don a skeleton mask and hold strangers at gunpoint. The strangers also appear on-screen, as Monroe seeks them out, one by one, hoping for redemption. Sometimes he gets it, sometimes he doesn’t…