You are currently browsing petebrook’s articles.
Cameron Todd Willingham in his cell on death row, in 1994. He insisted upon his innocence in the deaths of his children and refused an offer to plead guilty in return for a life sentence. © Ken Light.
Read the The New Yorker‘s article Trial by Fire about Cameron Todd Willingham, which asks, “Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?”
Ken Light photographed Willingham fifteen years ago in his death row cell.
Willingham was accused of setting his house alight while his three children slept inside, tried for arson and murder, found guilty and sentenced to death. He always professed his innocence. Willingham was executed on February 17th, 2004. Before and since his execution, evidence supporting his conviction has been brought into question. Eye-witness testimonies conflicted and the fire forensics for the case are considered unreliable.
Recently, I spoke with Ken Light about his Texas Death Row.
The New Yorker only had one photographer to turn to for an image of the incarcerated Willingham. Without Texas Death Row (1994), we would have precious little photographic record of the lives and experiences of Texas’ institutions for the condemned.
I’ll be away for the next few days, swimming in lakes, musing over Jane Evelyn Atwood‘s photography, finishing Mumia’s new book and photographing flying dogs.
In contrast to the harsh reality of the last post, I present the laughably unreal.
Whenever I find a photographic archive I, by reflex, punch in ‘prison’ into the search tool. I’ve started to do the same with stock agencies.
In the microstock world, image search results are disorienting. Instead of American Civil War jails, colonial prisons, prisoners of war, revolutionaries, genocide victims or political prisoners the return is staged portraiture, kitsch orange jumpsuit, bars, locks, handcuffs and silhouetted guard towers.
And, this is beyond the pale. WTF?
For simple graphic design purposes, I am sure even good intentioned advocates scout for imagery in stock databases of complete fiction in order to illustrate their message. Hmm.
A Teachable Moment: Avoiding Cliche
I have bemoaned before the cliche of cell-tier-perspective. I would encourage us all to really think about the relative contribution some prison photographs bring.
Even in photojournalism (a field not without its faults, but a mode I still firmly believe in) photographs of bars, keys and fences are common. So, to practitioners as to viewers, I urge the same rigour in critique.
Jenn Ackerman, Jane Evelyn Atwood, Lloyd Degrane, Jean Gaumy, Andrew Lichtenstein, Danny Lyon, Darcy Padilla, Lizzie Sadin and Taro Yamasaki are just some of the many photographers who’ve managed to describe prison life without overly-relying on the physical fabric of institutions. They spend enough privileged time with the inmates to tell the stories of the inmates.
His family claim he was 12 when he was taken into US custody. The pentagon claim he was 17. Whichever the case, the treatment remained the same.
Video from the Guardian.
“These analyses [of the prison system] – coupled with what I had seen firsthand – made sense, steering me to work towards the dismantling, rather than the reform, of the prison system. Resistance Behind Bars should not be mistaken for a call for more humane or ‘gender responsive’ prisons.”
Vikki Law (Source)
This is the second in a three part mini-series entitled Women Behind Bars, casting an eye over the work of writers and artists dealing with women’s struggle within the US prison system. The first installment featured journalist Silja Talvi’s work. Today we look at the activism of Vikki Law.
Speaking
“How many people know about the Attica prison riots?” asked Vikki Law. The majority of the audience raised hands. “How many of you have heard of the August Rebellion?” she then asked. No response. Point made.
The August Rebellion was staged in 1974 by women imprisoned at New York’s maximum-security prison at Bedford Hills. Protesting the brutal beating of a fellow prisoner, the women fought off guards, holding seven of them hostage, and took over sections of the prison.
Writing
Vikki Law wrote Resistance Behind Bars to counter the historical erasure of women’s prison resistance. The book challenges the reader to question why these instances and efforts have been ignored and why many assume that women do not organize to demand change. It fills the gap in the existing literature, which has focused mostly on the causes, conditions and effects of female imprisonment.
Law has worn many hats in the anti-prison movement. In 1996, she helped start Books Through Bars-New York City, a group that sends free books to prisoners nationwide. In 2000, she began concentrating on the needs and actions of women in prison, drawing attention to their issues by writing articles and giving public presentations. Since 2002, she has worked with women incarcerated nationwide to produce Tenacious: Art and Writings from Women in Prison and has facilitated having incarcerated women’s writings published in larger publications, such as Clamor magazine, the website “Women and Prison: A Site for Resistance” and the upcoming anthology Interrupted Lives.
Similar to Talvi’s work, her writing is uninfected with academese. Law’s focus is the self-organised activities of women prisoners such as forming peer education groups, clandestinely organizing ways for children to visit mothers in distant prisons and raising public awareness about their conditions.
Law will criticise writing that she deems unhelpful and misleading. For example she refutes author Virginia High Brislin’s work which stated “women inmates themselves have called very little attention to their situations,” and “are hardly ever involved in violent encounters with officials (i.e. riots), nor do they initiate litigation as often as do males in prison.”
Law urges us to acknowledge the existing patriarchy of society. The term feminism has become co-opted by predominantly white and privileged classes. The actions that would have previously fallen under the purview of feminism continue in pockets and without a top-down label. She states:
Once such case would be that is described below. Law takes the details from a letter written by the victim.
In the case of Barrilee Bannister, sentenced under Oregon’s mandatory sentencing law, she and seventy-eight other women were sent to a privatized, all-male prison in Arizona run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). The approximately 1300 mile move completely cut the women off from family, friends and others whose outside support could have prevented their abuse. Only weeks after the women’s arrival, some were visited by a captain, who shared marijuana with them. He left it with them and then returned with other officers who announced that they were searching the cell for contraband. They promised that if the women performed a strip tease, they would not search the cell. “Two of the girls started stripping and the rest of us got pulled into it,” Bannister recalled. “From that day on, the officers would bring marijuana in, or other stuff we were not suppose[d] to have, and the prisoners would perform [strip] dances.” From there, the guards became more aggressive, raping several of the women. Bannister reported that she was not given food for four days until she agreed to perform oral sex on a guard. (Source)
Private prisons will forever provide opportunities for gross abuse of human rights, but this is obvious and a discussion for another time. Still, on this evidence, Law has a long road of resistance and a lot of public education to provide. I wish her well.
Photography
Law’s commitments don’t stop with the pen. She also wields a camera and has contributed significantly to the activist-photography community of NYC.
ABC No Rio through a 6-year-old’s Holga, 2006
In 1997, she organized a group of activist photographers to transform one of No Rio’s upstairs tenement apartments into a black-and-white photo darkroom for community use. Since then, she has remained actively involved in coordinating (and sometimes co-teaching) free photography classes for neighborhood youth. In addition, she has participated in and curated numerous exhibitions at No Rio’s gallery, many with themes addressing social and political issues such as incarceration, grassroots efforts to rebuild New Orleans, Zapatista organizing, police brutality and squatting.
Every Halloween, Law also moonlights as a portraitist for ABC No Rio‘s free haunted house for kids. As she explains, “Over 400 kids from the neighborhood show up to shriek and scream their way through the first floor and backyard. Tipping my hat to Tom Warren’s “Portrait Studio” in the 1980s, I set up a portrait area to document some of the kids and their costumes.”
Below is Prison Photography‘s favourite.
Please read Vikki’s extended resume. Check out Vikki’s Flickr photostream. For a list of resources from The Action Committee for Women in Prison click here.
This is the first of three posts celebrating the work of journalists/academics/photographers bringing to popular conscience the abuse of women in the American prison system.
I have called this triplet mini-series Women Behind Bars and it was spurred by a couple of news stories this week. In New York state, protesters outside the Governors house drew a promise from David Paterson that he’d sign legislation banning the chaining of incarcerated women who are giving birth.
Also, a class action lawsuit is gearing up in Michigan, which seeks a $100million settlement for over 900 female inmates and former-inmates who suffered harassment, groping and rape between the years of 1993 and 2009.
Women Behind Bars as a name for this mini-series was co opted from the Silja J. Talvi‘s most recent book of the same title.
I had the pleasure of hearing Silja talk at the Seattle Public Library. Silja speaks as she writes – without jargon or polygonal argument. She keeps it simple; she is usually retelling the testimony of female prisoners she has visited and interviewed. No flourish required.
Beyond the physical and sexual harassment of female prisoners, Talvi asks us to reevaluate our understanding of psychological welfare as it is handled by the prison system. The 775% increase in the US female prison population since 1977 is – for want of a better word – criminal. It is double the rate of growth for the male prison population. Talvi is in no doubt that this increase is due for the most part to the war on drugs. Talvi also describes the constituencies entering US womens prisons.
Talvi’s work crystallises the fact that the massive incarceration of American women has not been a result of crime on the streets, but a result of criminalisation by writ of political assemblies. In the war on drugs, women are involved but surely we must analyse that involvement. Occupying residence, associating with family drug dealers are indirect misdemeanours that stand to be punished. When a society is blighted by drugs and the dealers are involved in the “war” on the street, usually it is women who hold the threads of family and community – and home – together … despite its faults and its drug use.
Talvi points to another remarkable trend,
There’s also the fact that women are less likely than men to snitch on loved ones. Prosecutors will come to them and say they will go to prison unless they give up the names of three higher-ups, but women usually either say they don’t know those people or will simply decline. Men will snitch and, unfortunately, they often get less time in prison than women who don’t.
The shocking statistics are simply an application of US culture that is too morally bankrupt & class divided to think of more imaginative forms of criminal justice than incarceration.
Prison is a violent, inhumane environment – the modern designations of built with violent offenders in mind. But what proportion of women prisoners are violent? Not nearly as many as our fear-gripped culture would presume.
The prison is a disciplinary tool that has needlessly subjugated women. It has been imposed and it has demolished poor communities.
When Talvi supports prison for violent murderers and rapists and then argues for its non-implementation for female ‘criminals’ she is entirely consistent. The prison has a place, but it is not in the persecution of non-violent females, it’s counter to the notion of justice and it flies in the face of social justice.
As This Is Not A Book Sale put it,
The book Women Behind Bars was produced as part of the Women Behind Bars Project which:
[Source]
Women Behind Bars. The Book: More and more women—mothers, grandmothers, wives, daughters, and sisters—are doing hard prison time all across the United States. Many of them are facing the prospect of years, decades, even lifetimes behind bars. Oddly, there’s been little public discussion about the dramatic increase of women in the prison system. What exactly is happening here, and why?
Bio: Silja J. A. Talvi is an award-winning journalist with credits in more than seventy-five publications nationwide, including The Nation, In These Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. She was honored as a recipient of the 2005 and 2006 PASS awards for criminal justice reporting by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a 2006 New American Media Award, and twelve regional SPJ awards for excellence in journalism. Talvi’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America’s Poor, Body Outlaws, The W Effect, It’s So You, and Prison Profiteers. She lives in Seattle.
Yes folks, a US prison runs a rodeo for the entertainment of the public (from Louisiana and beyond). Believe it.
I have only ever discussed this event in terms of is dicey ethics, but being a weak-spined liberal never gone full-throtle in condemning it as exploitation. Matt Kelley and I were both agreed that we couldn’t fully judge the spectacle without having been ourselves or talked directly with participants.
I met Tim McKulka, one of many photographers to have shot at Angola, and asked for his impression.
The rodeo of course exploits the prisoners. It is gladiatorial . It is taking people without the skills to ride a bull and putting them on a bull for peoples’ entertainment. For the prisoners themselves, it gives them the opportunity to be a normal person a couple of weekends in the year. It is an opportunity to make some money, to see their family, to earn a belt … so what have they got to lose?
Do you think any of them are taking part precisely because they are on life sentences?
I don’t know what the percentage of the participants is in terms of lifers. I know in the prison itself has about 92% [of offenders on life sentences] Some of them for some absurdly minor crimes – a third offense or an unarmed robbery. But I don’t know. What I do know is that – from the prisoners I talked to – it’s a voluntary program and no-one is forced to do it.
They are being exploited but that prison in particular is the only prison in America that turns a profit so it is an exploitative institution anyway.
McKulka has since moved far away from the cultural mores of the American South. He has crossed an ocean and continent but continues documenting the politics of race and identity.
Tim McKulka started shooting for Edipresse Publications in 2003. With Jean-Cosme Delaloye, he covered diverse feature stories such as the crisis in Haiti in 2006, the Angola Prison Rodeo, the US presidential elections in 2004, illegal immigration into the US and New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. In 2005, he covered the presidential elections in Liberia. In 2006, Tim started with Jean-Cosme this project of a news agency. He later joined the UN as a photographer in the fall 2006. He is now based in Juba, in Southern Sudan.
Jolted by photographs from this ludicrous Alcatraz Hotel in Kaiserslauten, Germany I recalled an article about prisons & jails converted to tourist accommodations. I guess it makes sense to convert solid and culture-worn stone fortresses into chic hotels such as at the Charles Street Jail/Liberty Hotel, Boston (it seems a shame to waste all that cool masonry) but a prison-theme is downright tacky.
I like the no-nonsense approach of Mount Gambier Jail in Australia which “markets its rooms as budget accommodations for cheapskates and backpackers”. Oxford Castle/Malmaison Hotel in the UK retained the open cell tiers of the prison, just adding some mood uplights for the new plastered ceiling.
Here’s an article on “Slumber Slammers” which points to the larger tawdry scene of architecture-as-theatre for those wantaway tourists whose appetite for the early 21st century now fails them.
Not to be outshone, the Japanese go the farthest in recreating the prison-spectacle with handcuffs, dungeon-krunk, lethally injected cocktails and salads that refer to incest?! Don’t quite understand the link for that last one …
I’d like to begin a discussion here about recuperation, but that is presuming there was ever an element of resistance or meaningful political opposition from these various sites. All we can say for certain is the current histories of these spaces are gradually erasing those of the past.
Prison Photography 