Rob Schmidt said that the film is a very loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1866 novel "Crime and Punishment." "The main character kills a terrible person, conceals the crime, is consumed by it, suffers secretly, confesses and in a spiritual way is reborn. It's just that it takes place in a California high school instead of Siberia," he said. Larry Gross had first written the script in the early 1990s, but it languished on a shelf until a run of high school films became popular in the last half of the decade. The film's original title was "Crime and Punishment in High School," but this was changed after the Columbine High School massacre happened on April 20, 1999.
The film was shot in the summer of 1999 and was in production by June 28. In her book "A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals" and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond, producer Christine Vachon detailed the problematic shoot of the film, which was the independent film production company Killer Films' first studio-backed movie, with bickering and threatening letters between the director and the writer, the director alienating the studio, and the film eventually getting dumped.
Crime + Punishment (2000) (stylized as "Crime + Punishment in Suburbia") is an American crime drama film directed by Rob Schmidt, written by Larry Gross, and starring Monica Keena, Vincent Kartheiser, Jeffrey Wright, James DeBello, Michael Ironside and Ellen Barkin. The film is a contemporary fable loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1866 novel "Crime and Punishment," and focuses on a high school student who plots to murder her stepfather after he brutally rapes her.