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Photo: Roger May. (Source)
You’d think after 26 months in an Iranian prison, Shane Bauer would not be interested in seeing the inside of another cell. Think again. As I’ve noted before, Bauer is a journalist with human rights at the core of his stories.
Since his return to the U.S. he has been increasingly involved in describing the real problem we have with our approach to corrections. From Bauer’s Mother Jones feature piece:
I’ve been corresponding with at least 20 inmates in SHUs around California as part of an investigation into why and how people end up here. While at Pelican Bay, I’m not allowed to see or speak to any of them. Since 1996, California law has given prison authorities full control of which inmates journalists can interview. The only one I’m permitted to speak to is the same person the New York Times was allowed to interview months before. He is getting out of the SHU because he informed on other prisoners. In fact, this SHU pod—the only one I am allowed to see—is populated entirely by prison informants. I ask repeatedly why I’m not allowed to visit another pod or speak to other SHU inmates. Eventually, Acosta snaps: “You’re just not.”
Bauer excavates the policy and the logic, if you can call it that, used by the CDCR in their categorisation of prisoners and how those policies lands individuals in solitary. Pelican Bay State Prison, the oldest state-built Supermax, is Kafkaesque in its imprisonment of prisoners classified as gang affiliated. Bauer describes the *evidence* used by the CDCR in its case tying Dietrich Pennington to gang activity.
In Pennington’s file, the “direct link” is his possession of an article published in the San Francisco Bay View, an African American newspaper with a circulation of around 15,000. The paper is approved for distribution in California prisons, and Pennington’s right to receive it is protected under state law. In the op-ed style article he had in his cell, titled “Guards confiscate ‘revolutionary’ materials at Pelican Bay,” a validated member of the Black Guerilla Family prison gang complains about the seizure of literature and pictures from his cell and accuses the prison of pursuing “racist policy.” In Pennington’s validation documents, the gang investigator contends that, by naming the confiscated materials, the author “communicates to associates of the BGF…as to which material needs to be studied.” No one alleges that Pennington ever attempted to contact the author. It is enough that he possessed the article.
Getting out is a Catch-22 that is best described by Bauer than I.
For the longest time, there was a media blackout in California prisons and very few journalists got in to the SHU. I have heard from a few reporters and photographers this year who have visited Pelican Bay’s SHU but on a very tightly controlled media tour. Ultimately, Bauer wants to decode what purposes are served by solitary confinement. The CDCR argues it keeps prison violence down, but …
Prison violence fluctuates for myriad reasons, among them overcrowding, gang politics, and prison conditions. It’s impossible to say for certain what role SHUs play; what is clear is that in states that have reduced solitary confinement — Colorado, Maine, and Mississippi — violence has not increased. […] Since Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman released 75 percent of inmates from solitary in the mid-2000s, violence has dropped 50 percent. CDCR officials claim California is different because the gang problem is worse here, though they don’t have data to confirm this.
Bauer goes on to compare the correspondences he received as a prisoner with the letters he receives from Californian prisoners during his investigation. He describes the extreme psychological stress of solitary confinement and possibility of less labyrinthine regulation of SHUs with forthcoming CDCR policy changes (which may or may not transpire.)
He also offers readers to chance to contact the prisoners in the article.
Recommended read.
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UPDATED: Oct 23rd, 2012
See Shane Bauer’s two-part conversation with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now – one and two – and his support for California Hunger Strikers alongside Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal in Oakland, Oct, 2011.
The Day Nobody Died (detail), by Broomberg and Chanarin
SOURCE, the Belfast based contemporary photography magazine, has recently been considering how we can define (if at all) and think of conceptual photography.
The series WHAT IS CONCEPTUAL PHOTOGRAPHY is anchored by three well researched and neatly edited videos that canvas the opinions of artists, photographers, curators and critics.
I enjoyed learning about the work of John Hilliard in the first video. The surprise that conceptual photography – to which I will apply the adjectives non-figurative and self-referential – finds a welcome reception in art galleries and art festivals such as Documenta should be no surprise at all. People still expect representations of things in photography and as such representational photographs still dominate our visual culture, and especially our news culture.
The debate gets interesting is in the third video when it attaches itself to a specific body of work, The Day Nobody Died, by Broomberg and Chanarin.
In June of 2008, Broomberg and Chanarin traveled to Afghanistan to be embedded with British Army units on the front line in Helmand Province. Instead of making *traditional* photojournalistic images of the conflict, they rolled out seven metre sections of a roll of photographic paper and exposed it to the sun for 20 seconds. The Day Nobody Died is a refusal of photojournalism tropes and a question to audiences: what constitutes evidence in war, and in photography?
Broomberg and Chanarin make an effective challenge to the mechanisms at play in the embedding system – a system that routinely denies the public many accurate images of war, i.e. the wounded or dead soldier. Sean O’Hagan, photography critic for the Guardian, on the other hand, describes the project as an “arrogant” and “narcissistic” stunt.
Recommended viewing.
PHOTOS OF NORWAY’S PRISONS: CONTEXT
Almost without exception, photographs of prisons in Norway featured in international media over the past two years have appeared below a headline featuring the word “luxury” or in simplified articles about the relative comfort of Norwegian prisons. The implication? That no criminals should live in safe, clean, environments and that rehabilitation is folly at best and an insulting waste of taxpayers money at worst.
I’d like to recommend a different take. Six of Fin Serck-Hanssen‘s photographs from Normalising Judgement appear throughout this post.
Serck-Hannsen’s view is neither expressly bleak nor expressly sugary. These drab prisons are nothing to get overly-emotive about and as such probably reflect fairly the predictable life in highly-managed institutions that try to redirect the most antisocial adult behaviours. As you click through to the links included herein, please refer back to Serck-Hanssen’s Normalising Judgement to challenge the “rosy” picture that may have been painted of Norway’s prisons in international media.
Completed in 2008, Serck-Hanssen’s Normalising Judgement pre-dates Breivik’s massacre. The Norwegian Ministry of Justice and Public Security was drafting a white paper, and invited Serck-Hanssen to document multiple prisons. As long as privacy was safeguarded and security was not put at risk, Serck-Hanssen was able to work freely throughout the prisons.
Serck-Hanssen told Mono blog, “In my view, Norwegians in general have the idea that prisons are very human institutions. I wanted to find out how much truth there was in this assumption.”
BREIVIK, MEDIA, ATTITUDES AT HOME AND ABROAD
When mass-murderer Anders Breivik was sentenced to 21 years in prison by a Norwegian court, it wasn’t at all clear to me how the verdict related to my efforts here at Prison Photography. The court ruled he was sane, yet I am quite happy to describe his ideas as repulsive and his actions as deranged. His offensive gestures and attitudes played out in the court reflected his right-wing islamophobic motives for the murder of 77 innocents on Utoya Island in July 2011.
Breivik has entered the select company of infamous and clearly unhinged murderers that history unfortunately seems to remember. Here at Prison Photography, my concerns are for the majority of American prisoners who are non-violent, poorly-educated, warehoused and given few opportunities to rehabilitate should they find themselves subject to the unusually long sentences the U.S. hands down. Breivik has zero in common with these men, women and children.
Somewhat surprisingly, there is commentary that is spurred by ideas and images about Breivik’s case and that relates to American prisons. Said commentary revolves around the issue of prison conditions. Namely, it centres on the divergent expectations of people in different nations on conditions for convicted criminals.
Even preceding Breivik’s horrendous crimes, there was a characterisation of Norwegian prisons as being “luxury” (the same characterisation/accusation has been aimed at the prisons of other European nations – Austria springs to mind). Sometimes, the term “humane” was used; a welcome alternative given that the term “luxury” often carries an inferred suspicion and jealousy.
In the week following the Utoya Island massacre, innumerable news sources ran stories about how Breivik would potentially serve his sentence in a “cushy” or “super-lux” or, closer to the truth, “progressive” prison.
As it is the highest security facility in the country, it was understandable that international media assumed that Breivik would be held in Norway’s recently constructed (2010) Halden Fengsel Prison. He is actually being held in Ila Prison, near Oslo (details; 14 photos; and the psychology of solitary).
CIVILITY OF PROCESS: CIVILITY OF PRISONS
Repeated slideshows often feigned dismay and disgust, or intended to stoke up anger. But it was an anger engineered for international audiences, not Norwegians. Norway was busy mourning, getting to grips with introspection and formalising the logistics to carry out one of the most high profile cases in its legal history. This isn’t to say that Norwegians didn’t feel anger, but they also knew they had to meet Breivik’s unparalleled assault with a dignified and civil response.
In the U.S., a country that routinely hands down the death penalty and Life Without Parole, Breivik’s sentence of 21 years seems comparatively tiny, even foolish.* Most American citizens would balk at the notion. And yet, when the verdict was passed, most Norwegian celebrated the fact that Norwegian law had handed down it’s most severe punishment and that the civility of the judicial system had remained in tact throughout despite the extreme heinous nature of Breivik’s crime (I only consumed news-stories on this event in the UK, so narratives may have differed elsewhere).
If societies are to learn and move forward from such horrendous events then they need something to rally around. In Norway, the humane and sensible legal system, in the response to acts of utter criminality, was an obvious ‘something.’ Americans can never rally around the death of someone sentenced to execution. Even in non-capital offenses, how proud can any U.S. citizen be of a legal system that has sentenced tens of millions to broken prison systems and is responsible for 2.3 million prisoners on any given day?
Prison (or the electric chair) shouldn’t be considered the final chapter. Prison should be considered an early chapter toward mending a broken individual and society’s shortcomings that led a given individual to transgress. Prison conditions are key in successfully rehabilitating individuals and successfully relieving society of future crime and the associated financial costs.
Dylan Matthews explains on the Washington Post’s Wonk Blog that Making prison worse doesn’t reduce crime. It increases it:
It turns out there’s a pretty extensive literature on the effects of harsh prison conditions. One finding that is growing more and more accepted is that harsh sentences, if anything, increase recidivism. […] Gerald Gaes and Scott Camp found that higher security levels increase recidivism by about 31 percent. Lawrence Bench and Terry Allen randomly assigned prisoners to medium and maximum security sectors of a prison and found that prisoners in maximum security were no less likely to commit in-prison offenses. […] Geographic isolation increases recidivism. A study from Rafael Di Tella and Ernesto Schargrodsky found that people who are sentenced to house arrest with ankle monitors reoffend at a much lower rate than those sentence to traditional prison. And a wide array of studies have found that in-prison education programs reduce recidivism while improving quality of life. The findings on the effects of prison conditions on recidivism, in short, are a matter of scholarly consensus.
No prison is a cake walk. All prisoners deserve to be safe. I’d argue all prisoners should be as meaningfully engaged in rehabilitative activities and subject to civil attitudes as is possible. But, I also understand why the idea of retribution for some extends to a desire to see prisoners wallow in poor conditions. I hope I’ve made the case here that Norwegian prison are not luxury and that furthermore shouldn’t be the exception. Better prison conditions means less crime in the future. Better prison conditions means improved individuals.
* The maximum sentence possible under Norwegian law is 21 years, although in special circumstances, and Breivik’s certainly one, judges may extend the sentence as it nears an end.
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All images Fin Serck-Hanssen. Get the book Normalizing Judgement here. Via here & now mono blog. Thanks to Robert Gumpert for the tip.
Woodbourne Correctional Facility inmate and Bard College student Abdullah Kamau Sankofa (left) studies in the computer room. He was been sentenced to 18 years in prison at the age of 17. Bill Doane (55) is one of his mentors.
Brooklyn-based German photographer, Stefan Falke made a series of photographs of the Bard Prison Initiative for a 2010 Die Zeit story.
I’m a huge fan of prison education programs and certainly college levels instruction. The interactions and the learning can shatter stereotypes. Falke’s photos do the same.
Former inmate Carlos Rosario, 35-year-old husband and father of four, was released from Woodbourne Correctional Facility after serving more than 12 years for armed robbery. Rosario is one of the students participating in the Bard Prison Initiative, a privately-funded program that offers inmates at five New York State prisons the opportunity to work toward a college degree from Bard College. The program is competitive, accepting only 15 new students at each facility every other year. Carlos Rosario received the Bachelor of Arts degree in social studies from the prestigious College Saturday, just a few days after his release. He had been working on it for the last six years. His senior thesis was titled “The Diet of Punishment: Prison Food and Penal Practice in the Post-Rehabilitative Era,” Rosario is credited with developing a garden in one of the few green spaces inside the otherwise cement-heavy prison. In the two years since the garden’s foundation, it has provided some of the only access the prison’s 800 inmates have to fresh vegetables and fruit. Rosario now works for a recycling company in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Police stop teenagers for ID and when one can’t produce it he is put in a police van and driven away. The other has to call his mother who didn’t answer. The police were about to haul him away when his brother showed up and presented ID. © Nina Berman
STOP AND FRISK
The controversial Stop & Frisk procedures of the New York Police Department (NYPD) have been enacted for decades, but due to a phenomenal rise in figures over the past decade, the issue has recently become a hot news topic.
Civil rights advocates point out that Stop & Frisks are disproportionately experienced by minorities. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) published a report: NYPD Stop-and-Frisk Activity in 2011/2012.
In 2002, the NYPD made 97,296 stops. In 2011, there were 685,724 stops. Not all stops result in frisks. Of the 381,704 frisks, 330,638 (89.2%) were of blacks and Latinos. By contrast, only 27,341 frisks (7.4%) were of whites.
The NYCLU reports:
“Young Black and Latino men were the targets of a hugely disproportionate number of stops. Though they account for only 4.7% of the city, black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24 accounted for 41.6% of stops in 2011.” …
“The number of stops of young black men exceeded the entire city population of young black men (168,126 as compared to 158,406). Ninety percent of young black and Latino men stopped were innocent.” …
“The 2011 data are striking in what they reveal about the large percentages of blacks and Latinos being stopped in precincts that have substantial percentages of white residents. For instance, the population of the 17th Precinct, which covers the East Side of Manhattan, has the lowest percentage of black and Latino residents in the city at 7.8%, yet 71.4% of those stopped in the precinct were black or Latino.“
In total, during the 10 years of the Bloomberg administration, there have been over 4,000,000 stops in New York city. The 524,873 extra stops in 2011 (as compared to 2002) recovered only 176 more guns.
In 2011, of the 381,704 frisks, 330,638 (89.2%) were of blacks and Latinos. By contrast, only 27,341 frisks (7.4%) were of whites.
Blacks and Latinos were more likely to be frisked and, among those frisked, are far less likely to be found with a weapon.
The New York Times reported last month that the NYPD has abused Stop & Frisk policies in recent years but others say the NYPD has – with officers’ routine street stops of minorities – been abusing its powers for decades.
Battle lines have been drawn. In May, NYCLU filed a lawsuit“challenging the NYPD’s unlawful practice of detaining, questioning and searching innocent New Yorkers – particularly blacks, Latinos and other non-whites.” In a counter attack, Mayor Bloomberg has called the NYCLU “dangerously wrong” and dismisses them as “no better than the NRA” for opposing the Stop & Frisk.
The Guardian just published data visualisation of NYC Stop & Frisk.
PHOTOGRAPHER’S INTEREST PIQUED
New York-based photographer Nina Berman has recently taken on the challenge of photographing this sprawling, all-encompassing issue. In the early stages of the project, she has published her forays in a couple (one and two) blog posts.
I realise this is a long conversation (possibly the longest I’ve ever published on Prison Photography) but it’s an important topic emerging in the popular consciousness right now.
Nina and I discuss how to make images of police activities and civil disobedience; talk about Nina’s motivations; pay attention to individual and group activists; and consider why attitudes about Stop & Frisk vary so wildly in the context of such controversial and stark statistics.
CONVERSATION
Why has this become a big issue recently?
Stop & Frisk has been a big issue for a long time in New York’s communities of colour. If you live in predominantly white community in New York you wouldn’t notice it because most white people are not stopped and frisked.
I think it’s a noticeable issue now because the numbers have got so high. There’s been some lawsuits and activist agitation so it has become more talked about. We’ve also seen connections made with other police aggressiveness and killings of unarmed black and brown men.
Is this just in NYC or is this indicative of issues at a national level?
It’s a national issue. A legal aid attorney, who lives in D.C., told me some months ago, that it was her feeling that it was worse in D.C. There is just a super-intense activist community here in New York who have just made it a central issue. And then there’s been lawsuits by the NYCLU and that has helped propel it into news reports. But I’ve been following it since November 2011 – at that time there was very little conversation about it. Now, it’s in the national press nearly every day.
How did it fall on to your radar?
I heard about it two years ago, either through a NYCLU or a Center for Constitutional Rights listserv. I read about lawsuits that have been put in against the NYPD. I thought that’s a huge number [of police stops]; what’s that all about?
Later, I saw a couple Stop & Frisks happen in the Bronx and it was just shocking. I started to follow some activists, who are just so dedicated; they are doing stuff everyday. The more I learned about it, the more I saw the connection between Stop & Frisks and what people are now calling the New Jim Crow; it’s not just the physical violation and potential humiliation of being stopped and searched but all the disenfranchisement that come as a result of that. That aspect has been missing in a lot of the news reports.
For instance, you may be stopped and the police officer may ask you for ID, and you may not have ID. As far as I know, there’s no ID law in New York city, but they may say, “You’re trespassing here,” and then you get a trespassing summons, or if you talk back to the officer, and ask ‘”Why are you stopping me?” you could get a disorderly conduct ticket and summons to court.
These are the kind of things that pile up. I’d like to see compiled statistics in New York city on how many disorderly conduct summons are given out, to whom they are given, and where they are given.
You said that you had witnessed a couple of Stop & Frisks?
I was in the Bronx on another project and I didn’t have my camera out. I saw a man riding a bicycle and a cop stopped him in the middle of the street. He stayed on his bicycle and he just immediately put his arms out in the air, like he knew precisely what position to assume. That’s a whole other thing that interests me; how body language for some people according to their race is a normalized gesture. For white people gestures [associated with Stop & Frisk] would be abnormal gestures.
Last summer, I saw a guy – he looked like he was 17 or 18 years old – in the Bronx and two plain-clothed cops came out and pushed him against a wall and stripped him of everything. It was intense.
What are the figures for stop and searches over the years?
Up to 700,000 in 2011. How many of those stops are also searches is unclear. Each year since 2002, stops have gone steadily up. If you calculate it for 2011, it is more than one a minute!* It is beyond comprehension.
What are the attitudes of the people in these communities who are effected?
There’s one guy in East Harlem I’ve come to know rather well. He’s been stopped and frisked his whole life and has never thought anything of it. One day, he saw his stepson stopped and searched. A light went off in his head; “What is going on here?” In another instance, his stepson was stopped and he was able to record the audio of the stop and the stuff the cops were saying was so abusive. After that, the father decided to get involved in civil disobedience and he’s out there every day involved in jail support, court support and rallying at precincts too. Many of the activists have been arrested.
Where have you been making photographs?
Outside precincts mostly; in Harlem, the Bronx, and Police Plaza downtown. Also, courthouses; mainly the Bronx criminal courthouse, the Manhattan criminal court house.
In the midst of the project, there was a police killing of a young man named Ramarley Graham. So the Stop & Frisk opposition got connected to issues around unwarranted police killings. They see it as part of the same racial profiling issue.
And the impact?
The impact has only been because of enormous amount of pressure – it’s kind of astonishing that you can have an impact at the grassroots level. Walking while Black [is the issue.] Jumaane Williams, a city councilman has stepped up and said, “I got stop and frisked, and I’m a councilman.”
The protestors I have met want an entire new style of policing; the police are not being seen as protectors, but as aggressors. Also, as part of some system – through these stops, this harassment, these summons, these stops – it just keeps people down.
If you speak to some of the parents, their concern is, “Okay, so my kid gets stopped 5 or 6 times for some bullshit thing and let’s see what happens when you seek college loan money. That’s the real fear. One of the fears. I guess the real fear is that a cop might kill your son. If he moves his hand the wrong way or something.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is just beginning inquiries. The NYPD is not really backing down. As of a month or so ago, Mayor Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly were saying ‘This is terrific.’
Michelle Alexander’s characterization of this documenting and disciplining on the streets as well as in the prisons as “The New Jim Crow.” It seems these rapidly rising figures of Stop & Frisk support her arguments. That this racial profiling begins on the street makes the larger, national issue even more terrifying and pernicious. A lot of the time people think it is locked facilities that control populations so vigorously, but here’s evidence that racism begins in free society. Would you agree?
One of my first experiences was photographing some boys who were walking back from the gym in the Bronx. They were stopped, taken to the precinct and their mothers were called. They came to the precinct and the mothers started getting upset. The police wouldn’t let the mothers see them. One of the boys was charged with disorderly conduct because he talked back to the cops and one the mothers said. “That’s it, I sending my kid to the South. I have to protect him from the NYPD.” I learned that there’s this whole reverse migration that goes on when a boy hits his teenage years. Families in New York – and this is not the fist time I’ve heard this – want to send their boys back south to live with relative and to protect them from the NYPD! That blew my mind.
Why has the NYPD taken on this policy which is clearly flawed but also a public relations disaster?
Well, so far it hasn’t been a public relations disaster; not until this year. What kicked it off was a very visible civil disobedience action by Professor Cornell West and a bunch of other in front of the Harlem police precinct. That was the first step. Why the NYPD is doing it? I don’t know if it a money maker which would be an interesting things to find out. All these summonses carry fines.
I personally think New York city has too many cops; it is the most heavily policed city in North America. There’s 40,000 cops so they have to do something. The other factor – and this is what people say on the streets – they are too afraid to go after real gangsters so they hit up these people that are doing nothing, so they can show they are meeting quotas.
Law enforcement says there’s some good in the policy – that gang-bangers don’t bring guns on to the street, because they’re afraid of being stopped; so it is kind of a *preventative* policy.
But statistics (see graph above) don’t really support that argument.
Plus, it’s clogged up the entire court system, the holding cells. Say you’re stopped at 3pm and given a disorderly conduct summons, you may not get to the precinct till 10 o’clock at night … and then they might send you to central booking. Can you imagine what that’d do to a kid, or to anyone? If you’re on a job that says, ‘If you don’t show up you get fired [you loose your job].’ These are real stories; they are not just hypotheticals.
This is what Michelle Alexander would refer to as your way into the system.
What usually happens during a Stop & Frisk?
Legally, if a police officer stops you, you don’t have to say a word. There’s all sorts of “know your rights” trainings all over the city now. And there’s CopWatch groups. Neighborhood people are going out in teams in the community and just watching them.
What you’re supposed to do is ask, “Officer, am I under arrest?” and if the officer says no, you’re supposed to walk away. Does it usually happen like that? No. You’re scared when someone comes up to you. You say something. Each Stop & Frisk handles very differently.
If you refuse to answer questions that might cause problems.
They may throw some charge. They could say you’re obstructing justice. They’re supposed to stop you if they suspect you of something. They’re only supposes to frisk you if they suspect you are carrying a weapon.
I think this policy is going to change. I think there has been a tremendous amount of change. I don’t know what they will then do with all these police officers!?
It used to be when a municipality had budget troubles they’d think about dropping the number of cops. They don’t think that any more. It’s an untouchable.
If they pulled this stuff on 57th Street, Park Avenue or Madison Avenue, can you imagine what would happen? Could you imagine someone walking out of Barney’s New York and the NYPD stopping and frisking the person?
The NYPD does it in neighborhoods where people aren’t going to say anything.
What the most egregious case you’ve learnt about?
In my video, a young man speaks. He’s in his twenties. What was he pulled in for? He was in the subway with his girlfriend going downtown. and his girlfriends sister swiped him through on the subway. He was busted for soliciting. They claimed he asked someone to swipe him through. Well, it’s not illegal to swipe someone through. He spent a whole day in the system because of that. You see some subway stations heavy with police officers. Why? Because they have so much crime? I don’t think so.
Tell us about the groups you’ve been working with and following.
There’s a fluid group of people whop aren’t connected through any specific structure. They find each other at events. Or, someone has a problem and knows one person and they reach out to the group. The group I’ve been following is called Stop Stop & Frisk and it is a mix of Black, Hispanic and White people from Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn. They plan to go Staten Island, where there’s lots of problems as well.
Opponents are a mix of working class and middle class, some social workers, legal aid workers, some students and some activists. Wherever there’s some action happening they’ll try to show up and show support. There was recently an action at Lehman High School in the Bronx. Kids were being harassed; it’s a very liquid surge of people who are interested. Go to any neighborhood that is predominantly Black or Hispanic and you’ll find people working on this issue.
The NYCLU has been on the forefront of the opposition?
Yes, and there’s been different organizations that have coalesced. There’s the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP). There is not one central group and that’s what it so amazing about it. People are waking up at the same time and saying, ‘Hey our neighborhood doesn’t have to be like this.’
How do you plan to pursue the story visually? It’s difficult, no?
I can certainly stake out more Stop & Frisks, and I’d like to do that. There’s also newly emerging surveillance infrastructure. The NYPD will roll these watch-towers into neighborhoods and watch certain places. I’d like to find a way to photograph this landscape that is constantly surveyed. You just have to figure out where these things are because they are moving all the time. And then I’m quite drawn to the mothers – the mothers who feel like they are going to lose their sons.
What do you think about this Pete?
Often material that gets to the heart of the matter is not the photography done by the well-meaning documentary photographers, but the images captured by the surveillance or official cameras. Look at the photos in the appendix of the Supreme Court ruling on the Plata vs. Brown case. The ruling established that overcrowding in California prisons led to preventable deaths, and therefore the conditions of detention for approximately 160,000 inmates was – is – cruel and unusual. Those photos were all taken by the California Department of Corrections itself.
Consider the Collateral Damage wikileaks video; it was US Army footage. The Abu Ghraib images were not taken by a journalist. Many of the photos that are central to expose are taken by those on the inside. It’s very difficult for an outsider to get that sort of access necessary.
So, I am interested in these movable NYPD watch towers. I never knew they existed.
They used them during Occupy. What Happened When I Tried to Get Some Answers About the Creepy NYPD Watchtower Monitoring OWS was a great story by Nick Turse about his encounters with the cops manning the occupy towers. Pete, you’re talking about the Prison Industrial Complex, and there’s is the Military Industrial Complex … well, this is the Homeland Security Industrial Complex. There’s money for new toys and they have to use it. They train police forces on them and they pull them out in every situation.
BUT if you’re in a residential neighborhood and you see one of these watchtowers for a few days, you wonder who’s doing the watching? Am I being watched? Maybe the person behind me is threatening? Is that what’s happening? Or am I being violated? Photographically, it’s not that easy to figure out how to cover these issues, but it’s not impossible. I think you just have to be clever; push yourself further. I feel pretty proud of myself for making the start I have, because you don’t see one photographer touching these things. I’m not patting myself on the back about this but I like the idea of engaging with these communities and the city I live in. I feel that’s important.
A couple of years ago, Fred Ritchin encouraged me to move away from purely historical survey of photography in prisons and think about how the strategies and apparatus of discipline and management developed in prisons have been implemented across free society – corporate parks, high-rise surveillance, riot and protest policing.
Your work from Homeland was subtle in how it connected Americans with the hardware for war and surveillance.
I’ve though of just parking myself in front of central booking in Bronx, in front of the courthouse. I was there for a while the other day when a cop was indicted for the killing of a young boy and I saw kid after kid being walked i n there in handcuffs. I foe want to actually photograph those numbers – and maybe you do that; it takes a day, a week, month – how many pictures can I actually make of Black kids in handcuffs? I’d make thousands.
The challenge is that so much of this you can’t see; you’re prevented from seeing. There is a former prosecutor who has become a big opponent of Stop & Frisk. He says the conditions inside the Manhattan holding cells are worse than anything he’s ever seen in his life, and that they’re designed to make you feel like an animal intentionally.
Criticism of holding cells doesn’t surprise. City jails have a more transient population. There’s a general rule of thumb that the shorter the amount of time someone stays in a cell, the less care they’ll take care of it.
Wouldn’t it be amazing to get a look inside a booking cell. Lawyers don’t even see a booking cell. I’ve thought about getting myself arrested just so I could see it and experience it for myself.
Don’t do that, Nina.
No, I don’t think so. But, it has entered my mind more than once. You see the activists who are doing it more and more. They want to get arrested. They’re so caught up in it. They want the reminder of how fucked up things are.
You said earlier that the courts and booking stations were getting backlogged, possibly because of the civil disobedience also?
Yes, apparently. Frivolous charges are clogging the system. Bobby Constantino, a former [and disillusioned] prosecutor from Boston, writes The Crown blog. He moved to New York, got himself arrested in a civil disobedience action and wrote a whole description of his arrest and booking.
Why have you ventured into video?
I realized the stories people were saying were important and they’d be really hard to capture in just stills. And to give my audience a sense of the cat-and-mouse game played out on the streets. Standing in front of a precinct screaming at police officers? People don’t just do that. People have to get to some sense of rage just to do that.
It would be interesting to speak to the District Attorney (DA) that deals with those cases and see how many cases are brought forward and how many get dropped. Often a DA doesn’t want to waste time and resources on petty charges, especially if the courts are stretched.
The thing is, a cop’s quota is still met as long as he writes the ticket. It’s not based on whether or not it goes through the court. For the cop, he doesn’t care if the case is dropped or not and this is where the reporting needs to come in. The Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Daily News; there needs to be a second level of reporting [from those outlets].
What is the infrastructure driving all of this? It’s not just Michael Bloomberg and Ray Kelly saying this is a crime fighting technique. What are the contradictions? If I was an investigative reporter, that’s what I’d be looking into.
Say you have a couple of disorderly conduct summons against you and you don’t show up to court, you’re going to have a warrant against you! Then you have a record … a real record. It’ll be interesting to see how many people come out for the daily marches. Everyday, more people sign on and it could end up being thousands and thousands of people.
Where do you feel you are at with your coverage of this issue?
I like the video I’ve made and I can certainly go more on it. But how do you photograph racial profiling? Or, furthermore the impulse to racial profile? If you look at some of these situations, in particular police killings – which I think of as the result of racial profiling – the cops are operating with one world view and the communities with another. They’re gulfs apart.
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*There are 525949 minutes in a year. Therefore, in 2011, the NYPD stopped someone every 45 seconds.
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NINA BERMAN
Nina Berman is a documentary photographer with a primary interest in the American political and social landscape. She is the author of two monographs Purple Hearts – Back from Iraq and Homeland, both examining war and militarism. Her work has been recognized with awards in art and journalism from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the World Press Photo Foundation, the Open Society Institute Documentary Fund and Hasselblad among others. She has participated in more than 70 solo and group exhibitions including the Whitney Museum of American Art 2010 Biennial, the Milano Triennale, 2010 and Dublin Contemporary 2011. Her work has been featured on CBS, CNN, PBS, ABC, BBC and reviewed in the New York Times, Aperture, Art in America, Afterimage, TIME, American Photo and Photoworks. She is a member of the NOOR photo collective and is an Associate Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Berman lives in New York City.
Image: Ron Haviv / VII Photo
UPDATED: 06/27. 4:25am EST
Following the September launch of VII Photo/Think Outside the Cell’s collaboration, Prison Photography will roll out four related interviews with each VII photographer to capture first hand the journalists’ perspective on reentry, on the images and video they made, on the stakes at hand for subjects who are navigating a precarious time following their incarceration and on the relevance of image to public attitude.
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On Saturday afternoon, I listened to Michael Shaw’s lecture about how governments and corporations are increasingly influencing flows of images through strategic releases and staged ops. In a time of shrinking budgets, especially among printed media, we are all aware of how the modified – or sometimes not so modified – press release is quickly reworded and passed off as news. It goes without saying that this is a sad state of affairs. It goes with saying because below I am presenting an unmodified press release from VII Photo.
I should also add that I have spoken with a few representatives of VII Photo over the past few days and my decision to post this was also shaped by my keen personal interest in their professional pursuits as well as the personalities working away in VII’s Dumbo headquarters.
When I started blogging, I was a Billy-Nobody … and I rarely knew the photographers or organisations I was writing about. As time has passed, however, I am more frequently in the position of writing about the activities of people I know or with whom I may have shared a drink or meal.
Such a growing fraternity may not be unusual for anyone wending her or his way through any field – and this might be a disclaimer of unusual length – but I wanted to say that things feel different now.
I am not invisible anymore.
PRESS RELEASE
VII PHOTO AGENCY ANNOUNCES VISUAL COMMUNICATIONS PARTNERSHIP WITH THINK OUTSIDE THE CELL FOUNDATION
VII Photo Agency today announced a new long-term partnership with the Think Outside the Cell Foundation to produce documentary film and photography features that raise awareness about the experience of formerly incarcerated persons.
Think Outside the Cell is a non-profit organization founded in 2010 that works with the incarcerated, formerly incarcerated and their families to help end the stigma of incarceration. Through personal development workshops, storytelling and other creative approaches that provide building blocks for productive lives, the Foundation helps those affected by the prison system to create their own opportunities.
The first documentary feature project of this partnership will include a short film and photography essays that capture two subjects in New York City as they experience the daily challenges of reintegrating into society after being released from prison. The project will be launched Tuesday, September 18 on the Think Outside the Cell website and screened nationally at conferences, education forums, debates and in policy circles addressing legislation related to mass incarceration. The imagery and film will be syndicated by VII Photo internationally.
Each year, an estimated 700,000 people are released from prison in the United States, including approximately 26,000 in the state of New York. Often, people are branded as felons for life, and the stigma creates societal barriers that make successful reentry unattainable and staying out of prison with limited access to resources unsustainable.
VII photographers Jessica Dimmock, Ashley Gilbertson, Ron Haviv and Ed Kashi are collaborating as a team shadowing the subjects day-to-day as they deal with the challenges of reintegrating into society.
The partnership launches a long-term collaboration between VII Photo and Think Outside the Cell. VII will act as the Foundation’s exclusive visual communications partner with the aim of raising awareness about incarceration’s stigma and the local, state and federal laws that prevent formerly incarcerated persons from accessing the resources necessary to establish a stable and productive life.
“Think Outside the Cell is delighted to work with VII Photo in tackling head-on the stigma of incarceration,” said Sheila Rule, the Foundation’s co-founder. “Countless men and women who’ve been to prison have extraordinary potential, yet this crippling stigma has led to laws and policies that make it legal to deny them the essential components of full citizenship; employment, housing, educational opportunities, public benefits and the right to vote. Our visual partnership with VII Photo will open hearts and minds to the true impact of the long shadow of incarceration.”
Contact:
Kimberly J. Soenen
, Director of Business Development
Tel: 718.858.3130
kimberly@viiphoto.com
The Global Post has just launched ENCARCELACION an investigative series about the correctional systems of Latin America that “have gone horribly wrong.”
We’ve seen the headlines of jailbreaks in Mexico, riots in Venezuelan prisons, and fires in Honduran jails, but often these stories seems a world away. The politics underpinning the strife in Latin American prisons is not my area of expertise but the importance of the stories is undeniable. It is interesting that the Global Post has used photography as an anchor to the front page.
After digging down into ENCARCELACION‘s trove of info, you may want to follow links to Prison Photography‘s irregular coverage of various aspects of life in Latin American prisons:
Gary Knight – Joao Pina – Jackie Dewe Matthews – Valerio Bispuri – Pedro Lobo – Vance Jacobs and Columbian prisoners – tourist photography in Bolivian prisons – prison tattoos (some from Central America) – Kate Orlinksky’s portraits of Mexican female prisoners – Fabio Cuttica at a Columbian prison beauty pageant – Patricia Aridjis in Mexico – even Cornell Capa was in Latin American prisons at one time.
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Thanks to Theo Stroomer for the heads up.
Click for a larger version
PRISON EDUCATION AND REFORM
“Our situation is peculiar in that the students here are adults and prisoners […] Students have no defined parent. […] Unlike in the mainstream, we provide our students with everything [as a parent would]. We appeal to the government to take over this parental role.”
– – Mr Anatoli Biryomumaisho, head teacher of the Luzira Prison School, quoted in the Daily Monitor, Uganda, March 1st 2012.
From the tone of this article and the situation described by Biryomumaisho it seems Ugandan prison reformers have similar difficulties as their American counterparts in convincing wider society to invest in education for prisoners.
The activity described at the Luzira School is small, unhyped and vital; just one small victory among billions that play out every hour of every day. Quite different in scale to the crusade of Invisible Children.
Andrea Stultiens
Dutch photographer and critic, Andrea Stultiens sent the above article to me yesterday.
Stultiens has spent a lot of time in Uganda. If you want to be exposed to truly novel (and vernacular) photography from Uganda, you should explore her archival project History In Progress Uganda (Facebook group) and pick up a copy of her book The Kaddu Wasswa Archive.
KONY 2012 CONTROVERSY
Elsewhere, Uganda – or a version of Uganda – has been all over the internet. I’ve not much to add to the debate about the viral and controversial KONY2012/Invisible Children campaign, except to advise you to read these five pieces:
Invisible Children founders posing with guns: an interview with the photographer (Washington Post)
In Uganda, Few Can See Kony Video (NYT)
More Perspective on KONY2012 (Rosebell Kagumire’s blog)
Guest post: Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things) (Foreign Policy)
Why Invisible Children Can’t Explain Away This Photo (Scarlett Lion/Glenna Gordon)
And also, follow Glenna Gordon, John Edwin Mason and Rosebell Kagumire on Twitter. They’ve got reasonable things to say often.
Prison Photography 