TO SHOOT A KITE

d

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JULIE GREEN

ASHLEY HUNT

LUCKY PIERRE

PRISON AND NEIGHBORHOOD ART PROJECT (P+NAP)

SARAH ROSS

DREAD SCOTT

JACKIE SUMELL

TEMPORARY SERVICES

TAMMS YEAR TEN

TO SHOOT A KITECURATED BY YAELLE AMIR

CUE ART FOUNDATIONJULY 5 - AUGUST 2, 2014

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BOARD OF DIRECTORSGregory AmenoffTheodore S. BergerSanford BiggersThomas G. DevineThomas K.Y. Hsu Vivian KuanCorina LarkinBrian D. Starer

CURATORIAL ADVISORY COUNCILGregory AmenoffLynn CrawfordPaddy JohnsonTrenton Doyle HancockPablo Helguera Sharon LockhartAndrea Zittel

CUE FELLOWSPolly ApfelbaumTheodore S. Berger, ChairIan CooperWilliam CorbettMichelle GrabnerEleanor Heartney Deborah KassCorina LarkinJonathan LethemRossana MartinezJuan SánchezIrving Sandler, Senior FellowCarolyn SomersLilly Wei

STAFFBeatrice Wolert-Weese Interim Director

Jessica Gildea Programs Director

Hannah Malyn Development Manager

Shona Masarin-Hurst Programs Assistant

This exhibition was the winning selection of the 2013 Open Call for Curatorial Projects. This program provides one deserving curator the necessary time and resources to realize an innovative project, with the aim of encouraging curatorial research in tandem with exhibition planning. The proposal was unanimously selected by a jury comprised of panelists Suzanne Kim, Director of Exhibitions, SmackMellon; artist Pablo Helguera; and artist and 2013 Guggenheim Fellow Laura Parnes.

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CUE ART FOUNDATION IS A DYNAMIC VISUAL ARTS CENTER DEDICATED TO CREATING ESSENTIAL CAREER AND EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR EMERGING ARTISTS OF ALL AGES. THROUGH EXHIBITIONS, ARTS EDUCATION, AND PUBLIC PROGRAMS, CUE PROVIDES ARTISTS AND AUDIENCES WITH SUSTAINING AND MEANINGFUL EXPERIENCES AND RESOURCES.

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To Shoot A Kite By Yaelle Amir, Curator

Anywhere and Everywhere, Translating CaptivityBy Ashley Hunt

Human NatureBy Lilly Lampe

CONTENTS

ESSAYS ARTISTS

Julie Green

Ashley Hunt

Lucky Pierre

Prison and Neighborhood Art Project (P+NAP)

Dread Scott

Jackie Sumell

Temporary Services, Tamms Year Ten, and Sarah Ross

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14

25

30

34

38

42

46

50

54

Biographies

Checklist

Resources

Acknowledgments

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61

63

Texts by Yaelle Amir, unlessotherwise noted

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ESSAYS

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TO SHOOT A KITE By Yaelle Amir, Curator

The best activism is equal parts love and equal parts anger.—Jackie Sumell1

In June 2012, Sesame Street introduced Alex, a new character on its online interactive program Little Children, Big Challenges. In the short educational video, Alex admits his father is in prison after skirting questions from his friends on his dad’s whereabouts.2 What does it say about the United States when one of its most popular early-childhood education programs finds the issue of incarceration widespread enough to incorporate it into its curriculum? Alex is one of approximately 2.7 million American children who have a parent currently incarcerated (one in every 28 children), two-thirds of whom are in for nonviolent crimes.3

According to data published by the Prison Policy Initiative in March 2014, there are currently more than 2.4 million people being held in U.S. incarceration facilities, including state and federal prisons, juvenile correctional facilities, local jails, Indian County jails, military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories (see page 12).4 This rate is greater than any other country: of the approximately 10 million people who have been sentenced around the world, the U.S.

Sofia, Abby and Rosita comfort Alex by giving him a hug and listening to his feelings as part of Sesame Street’s Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration initiative. © 2013 Sesame Workshop. Photo by: Gil Vaknin.

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incarcerates close to a fourth (2.4 million), followed by China (1.65 million) and Russia (0.81 million).5 Constituting 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. holds approximately 25% of its inmates.6 Louisiana is the “world’s prison capital” with 1 in 86 adults serving time, close to twice the national average.7 This policy comes at a hefty cost: in 2013 the federal system spent $7.9 billion on prisoner expenses.8 In New York City alone, the cost per prisoner in 2012 was an astounding $167,731 owing to the remote location of the city’s jail facilities on Rikers Island, where the inmates are far out of sight and the price to transport them to the city courts is high.9 Finally, the broader picture of the U.S. government’s priorities is placed in sharp focus when recognizing that prisons account for 10% of the recent budgets, while higher education dropped below 8%.10 Let us back up a bit and trace how the U.S. came to earn the dubious title of “most incarcerated in the world.” Regardless of what fear mongers within the penal system and the media maintain publicly, our prison population increased from roughly 350,000 to 2.4 million in the past 25 years not because of heightened crime rates, but due to policy changes.11 In fact, 92% of all federal prisoners are in for nonviolent crimes, as are 48% of all state prisoners.12 What to make of this data? To understand what caused this significant jump we have to look back to several events in recent history, namely the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan declared the War on Drugs. This policy inflated the budgets of federal law enforcement agencies tenfold.13 The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act law introduced mandatory minimum sentences (5 to 10 years) for the distribution of cocaine, with a crucial 100-to-1 distinction between crack cocaine that was linked to use by African Americans, and powder cocaine that was associated with whites.14 This distinction led to what Michelle Alexander has termed in her seminal book by the same name “The New Jim Crow” era, where black men were disproportionately prosecuted for drug offenses due to the elevated mandatory sentence for crack, thus creating a new racial caste system.15 One in 12 working-aged Black men and one in 36 working-aged Hispanic men are in prison, while white men of the same age represent a mere fraction at one in 87.16 This is a staggering statistic. An individual facing sentencing in the U.S. for a minor drug offense is likely to serve a longer prison sentence than a convicted murderer will in other countries.17 This law was exacerbated by Bill Clinton’s 1994 federal “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law, which mandated life sentences in some cases for third-time offenders. In total, over 31 million people have been arrested since the War on Drugs campaign was initiated.18

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In addition to the War on Drugs, two more reasons are worth mentioning to account for the increase in incarcerated individuals. First, the last two decades have revealed a strong inclination to detain both documented and undocumented immigrants who constitute more than half of all federal prosecutions.19 Laws put into place by the government (the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996) have mandated the detention of immigrants regardless of whether they were deemed not dangerous or a flight risk, resulting in a 500% increase of detainees.20 Second, the rise of the prison industrial complex—a term that describes the conflation of business and government interests—partially accounts for the motivations behind keeping sentencing rates high and alternative solutions out of the system. A financial interest begins to inform the setting and operations of privatized prisons, which in turn incentivizes the stakeholders to keep the extreme policies in place. In this era, therefore, prisons equal money.21 Today prisons are mostly located in economically depressed rural areas, where the incarcerated are hidden out of sight, and thus, out of the minds of the broad public. Once they are released from prison, they are faced with a new set of challenges where their lives are still very much informed by their recent experiences: they are marked as ‘criminals’ and can seldom shake the ‘prison label’ that is attached to them from the moment they enter the criminal justice system, whether ultimately sentenced or not.22 Once branded a felon, individuals are often faced with hiring discrimination, and many are also disqualified from receiving federal welfare benefits, including food stamps, public housing, and healthcare. It is thus no surprise that recidivism rates are high, with those labeled felons finding themselves back in the prison system.23 The excessive television coverage of the War on Drugs typically took its cues from the Reagan administration’s race-driven ideology that positioned crack cocaine as an epidemic sweeping through neighborhoods across the U.S., even though the drug’s pervasiveness has been documented as becoming established mostly after the launch of the administration’s campaign. The Black community’s recourse to cocaine in crack form therefore positioned them as the top offenders in this “war,” where they were (and are) often associated with criminal activity.24 Another campaign of stigmatization would ensure common usage of the term “illegal” in the media when referring to immigrants. “Illegal” is perceived as a racially coded and dehumanizing label that reduces the individual

To Shoot a Kite

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to a single negative abstraction. Motivated by political strategy, the word has been used to denote difference and criminalize non-citizens.25 What is, therefore, our primary source material for conjuring an image of the “criminal”? For many it is likely television, films, and other elements of pop culture that prioritize tropes to anchor storylines at the cost of factual context. They are dominant platforms of communication that categorically flatten situations, overlook details and disregard the systemic conditions that are at the core of their narratives. As a result, they perpetuate common racial biases and position the criminal—usually Black or Latino—as the “Other,” who should be prosecuted and locked away regardless of circumstance. This brief overview of the American detention system over the past few decades leads us to the works included in the exhibition To Shoot A Kite. In prison-speak, a ‘kite’ represents notes or letters and ‘to shoot a kite’ means to send a message.26 The projects included in this show, and further detailed throughout this catalogue, represent the work of a select group of artists who have set out to relay the severe conditions of prisoners and expose this broken system. In so doing, they are reframing the narrative surrounding the incarcerated—providing a platform for public expression and advocating for change both from within and outside the prison system. Each project takes on a different form—from documentation and data visualization to offering services and advocacy. They provide a link between the incarcerated and the outside world, portraying their conditions, and personalizing the abundant yet anonymous data about the prison system. This exhibition by no means represents an exhaustive account of the incredible work being done by creative individuals on behalf of the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated (see the Resources section for more). As our society’s official priorities continue to shift away from delivering social services, motivated individuals take up the task of filling the needs of underserved and overlooked communities. These projects (detailed in the Artists section) serve as a mere sample of thousands of projects by artists and activists who have dedicated their work to raising awareness, and bringing about reform where political leadership has either failed to address the problem or been complicit in its very formation.27 Ashley Hunt’s Corrections Documentary Project is a comprehensive body of work about the prison industrial complex, primarily examining the politics and economics of the massive increase of the U.S. prisoner population since the 1970s. The project is

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comprised of nine videos and two maps that reveal the manner in which this system helps structure and preserve the racial and economic hierarchies of today's society (p. 34). In 2008, a group of collaborators—Temporary Services, Tamms Year Ten and Sarah Ross—sent letters to every prisoner in the now-shuttered Illinois Tamms Supermax Prison, inviting them to partake in Supermax Subscriptions—a program that exchanges frequent flier miles with magazine subscriptions for prisoners in long-term solitary confinement. In offering this service, the project exposed the inhumanity of maximum-security facilities, and enabled individuals to infiltrate these secluded confines to make a meaningful contribution to the lives of those often forgotten inside (p. 54). In the ongoing series The Last Supper, Julie Green paints last-meal requests on secondhand ceramic plates, telling the stories of death row inmates through food. This ritual serves a humanizing representation—a kind of memorial—where their final choice is permanently recorded (p. 30). Lockdown is a project that presents a fragment of the population of 2.4 million people locked away in U.S. prisons. The eleven photo portraits and interview excerpts were recorded during one-hour visits Dread Scott made to a prison and at a meeting with youth who had been through the system. The project depicts a group that is acutely aware of how they got to the position they are in, as well as of the politics driving the criminal justice system (p. 46). The Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project (P+NAP) connects teaching artists and scholars with incarcerated men through semester-long humanities classes, workshops and guest lectures at Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum-security state facility in Greater Chicago. Collaboration is at the core of the program, where free and incarcerated artists work together to critically communicate to a broad public the issues of imprisonment, isolation, and social segregation (p. 42). Members of the collaborative Lucky Pierre began the ongoing video project Final Meals in 2003 based on the now-defunct last meals archive on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's website. In the project, they prepare each requested meal and film a volunteer sitting with it for 25 minutes. By setting up this intimate configuration where a free person is faced with the final request of an individual whose death was sanctioned by the state, Lucky Pierre creates a living monument to the deceased (p. 38). In 2002, Jackie Sumell sent Herman Wallace, a man in long-term solitary confinement, a letter asking: "What kind of a house does a man who has lived in a 6 ft. x 9 ft. cell for over 30 years dream of?" This sparked a correspondence between the two through which

To Shoot a Kite

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Wallace describes in detail what his future home might include. This communication evolved into a strong friendship that served as the heart of Sumell’s campaign to not only build Wallace’s dream home, but also fight for his ultimate release from prison. (p. 50). These projects and numerous others—whether working directly with the incarcerated community or making a gesture in their name—embody the strength in creative communication and advocacy on behalf of those who have been marked by governing entities as worthy of less than the rest of us. Imagine if the U.S. were to change its policies on its prosecution of drug offenders, resolving to send defendants to rehabilitation programs rather than prisons? Or if instead of increasing funding to law enforcement agencies, resources would be diverted to drug treatment and anti-drug education? Further yet, what if state-funded education programs returned to prisons to provide inmates with training that could better position them to find a job upon their release? And once they are finally freed—already struggling with the psychological effects of the isolating conditions they have endured—why not help them reintegrate into society, rather than systematically keep them excluded? Could we bring our society to the position where when the formerly incarcerated step outside the prison gates, there is acceptance that their debt to us has been fully paid? In many communities around the country, a significant shift in public opinion must occur so that the dehumanization of the incarcerated can end. And while there are numerous solutions that may alleviate the situation, it is important to remember that the justice system in the U.S. is decidedly broken. Thus only a truly radical break in our society can likely bring an end to mass incarceration in America. To Shoot A Kite does not provide any answers to the complex system laid out in this essay, but rather raises many questions. With creative means, these artists communicate to us the conditions of incarcerated individuals, so that we can see the true nature of the cruel and unjust penal system buried in our midst. It is our time to speak up for an end to the discrimination of a large part of our populace, so that everyone has a fighting chance at the opportunities that have long been championed by our society. After everything we have heard and all that we have seen, how can we look away?

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How many people are locked up in the United States?, 2014

Infographic. Courtesy of the Prison Policy Initiative.

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1 Jackie Sumell, The House that Herman Built <http://hermanshouse.org/media> Accessed 17 April 2014.

2 "Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration.” <http://www.sesa-mestreet.org/parents/topicsandactivities/toolkits/incarceration> Accessed 16 April 2014.

3 The Pew Charitable Trusts, Collateral Costs: Incarceration’s Effect on Economic Mobility (Washington, DC: The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010), 4. This statistic also reveals a long-term effect, as “A child’s prospect for upward economic mobility is negatively affected by the incarceration of a parent,” Pew, 5.

4 Peter Wagner and Leah Sakala, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie,” Prison Policy Initiative, 12 March 2014 <http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie.html>.

5 Roy Walmsley, “World Prison Population List: 9th Edition,” International Centre for Prison Studies, University of Essex, May 2011 <http://www.idcr.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/WPPL-9-22.pdf>.

6 Charlie Savage, “Sentences of 8 Are Commuted in Crack Cases,” New York Times, 19 December 2013: A1.

7 Cindy Chang, “Louisiana is the world’s prison capital,” The Times-Picayune, 13 May 2012 <http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/05/louisiana_is_the_worlds_prison.html>.

8 Savage, A1.

9 Jake Pearson, “In NYC, Each Inmate Costs Almost As Much As An Ivy League Tuition,” The Huffington Post, September 30, 2013 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/30/nyc-inmate-cost-ivy-league_n_4015836.html>.

10 John Tierney, “For Lesser Crimes, Rethinking Life Behind Bars,” New York Times, 12 December 2012: A1.

11 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2012), 93.

12 Maia Szalavitz, “Viewpoint: What’s Missing from Sesame Street’s Parents in Prison Toolkit,” TIME Magazine, 13 June 2013 <http://healthland.time.com/2013/06/13/viewpoint-whats-missing-from-sesame-streets-parents-in-prison-toolkit>.

13 Alexander, 49.

14 Under the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, this disparity was reduced from a 100:1 to 18:1 weight ratio and eliminated the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of crack cocaine.

15 “Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates on a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate

collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group largely defined by race.” Alexander, 13.

16 Pew, 4. In some major cities in the U.S., as many as 80% of African American men have criminal records. Alexander, 7.

17 Alexander, 89. In a significant step towards correcting this policy, Attorney General Eric Holder directed prosecutors in August 2013 to cease listing quantities in minor drug offenses so as to avoid meeting the strict mandatory minimum laws. Savage, A1.

18 Alexander, 60.

19 Doris Meissner, Donald M. Kerwin, Muzaffar Chishti, and Claire Bergeron, Immigration Enforcement in the United States: The Rise of a Formidable Machinery (Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2013), 7.

20 Meissner, 11.

21 This aspect of the penal system is examined at length in Ashley Hunt’s essay in this catalogue.

22 Alexander, 94.

23 The most recent data by the Bureau of Justice Statistics was released in 2007 <http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=17>.

24 For more on the media’s role in shaping the War on Drugs, see Jimmie L. Reeves and Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine, and the Reagan Legacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). Michelle Alexander writes about a 1995 survey in which people were asked to describe a drug user – 95% pictured a Black user: Alexander, 106. Further, Ashley Hunt has stated: “if a public is already predisposed to see black people as criminal, they are not going to be shocked when seeing them treated like criminals.” Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Ashley Hunt, “Representations of the Erased,” in exh. cat., No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossing Occurs at Night, ed. Sladja Blazan and Anselm Franke (Berlin: Köln König, 2006), 8-9.

25 Read more about the “Drop the I-Word” campaign at http://color-lines.com/droptheiword.

26 A Prisoner’s Dictionary <http://aren.org/prison/documents/dic-tionary/words.htm> Accessed 29 March 2014. I first learned of this term via the project Thousand Kites by the Kentucky-based collective Appalshop that produces performance, web, video and radio shows on the topic of the U.S. prison system: http://thousandkites.org.

27 See “Resources” section for a short list of additional services and organizations.

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ANYWHERE AND EVERYWHERE, TRANSLATING CAPTIVITYBy Ashley Hunt

This essay has been adapted from a version first published in the exhibition catalogue for Crime and Punishment at Kunsthalle Tallinn, Estonia, 2007 (curated by Anders Härm).

translation.

I am trying to be mindful in writing this, myself in one place, and you, the reader, in another. You might suggest that this is always the task of writing, speaking from one place to another, across some distance. But this essay began from a more precise desire, a desire to address translation—not only the translation of language, but the translation of life: its forms, practices, restrictions and freedoms.

For some time I have been thinking about the idea of “jurisdiction,” or how the authority of a state power is meant to end at its borders. I have been thinking about how this notion might limit our understanding of power, how it spreads and takes shape, and the relationships it forms between what appear to be discrete places. For example, from the U.S., to Estonia, to Norway, to South Africa—while each has its own jurisdictions and histories, what is shared across them?

language.

In terms of language, the translation of an idea is never an open window, as if an idea could pass untouched from one side to the other, unscathed as it leaves one house of sound and gesture to the next. Such passage always alters its content, refracting it; gathering it from the fabric of one set of histories, stories, patterns and habits and releasing it into another. The conditions for speech and for listening touch the translator and translated alike; they leave a stain upon the object that we had expected to pass unblemished. As an idea in the world aligns itself to a sound or an image, we see pollutants of life—locality, subjectivity and memory—attaching and smuggling themselves into each and every utterance.

Despite this, something of the original still translates—something that, regardless of the borders between, communicates through the noise. One thinker referred to “translatability,” saying that, “If the kinship of languages is to be demonstrated it means (…) that a specific significance inherent in the original manifest itself in its translatability.”1

Rather than consider that significance as a mysterious power that, alone, refuses to dilute in its translation, we might ask if this is not a significance to, to the space in which that translation is received; where between the two objects there is a resonance, in the way that vibrations resonate sympathetically between objects and instruments sensitive to the same frequencies of sound. A resonance that has as much to do with a receptivity in the place of its arrival as it does with the force of the original.

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place.

“Place,” too, is like a language. As a sense of place spreads, as it extends out through space, it lends a character to the things that fall within its sphere, offering feelings of location and identity, connections shared with people, things and histories, and a common sense of how things work—knowhow, itineraries and secrets that structure the topography of place, the freedoms it will honor and the bondages it will coerce.

Such aspects of place are like words—they extend legibility to things. Like words, place offers shared meanings to things, translating private resonances from me to you so that we can share an understanding that bears local residues, developing relationships-in-common where we might decide how we feel about it, how we will live with it, and how we might differ in relationship to it. Moving with an aesthetic pulse of presence and absence, visible and invisible, voice and voiceless, place spreads like a language across a space, generating a field of commonality among those who weave through it, who come into dialogue, into agreement, into competition, and into relations of power.

At the edges of place, a border is formed—a location where, also like language, the legibilities lent by one place stop, giving way to another field of meanings. From one side of that border and back, an architecture of differences is accrued—differences concocted, marked and projected from each side onto its other so as to confirm the value of their respective sides. No matter how continuous and fluid things may remain from one side of that border to the other, place carries the illusionary power to erase their similarity, and the border becomes real, invested with violence. And just as this violence interrupts the flows of life at the border, the presumption of difference where continuity may in fact exist also allows things to pass unnoticed, where “kinships” of translatable things may be found to help us to better know our world and the powers that act in our name.

this place.

I am writing from the place where I live, Los Angeles. I live in a country that is obsessed with its borders, such that our airwaves dance with hallucinations of what does and does not cross them day and night. Rather than asking what conditions of translatability connect the sides of the border, what kinships in the language of place, necessity, family, land and history evoke passage across it, or what forms of receptivity we possess to encourage the border’s transgression—politicians and private contractors make a healthy living constructing fences, giving speeches, building weapons, elaborating protocols for deadly force and the capture of people, as people become contraband.

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Anywhere and Everywhere, Translating Captivity

This contributes to one of the fastest growing components of the prison and jail system that makes the U.S. the most prolific jailer in modern history. Within its jurisdiction, the U.S. possesses a rich economy in bodies, an economy of people moved in and out of their places, stripped of the rights that make them legible as human beings and political subjects; an economy that underlies the larger strata of wealth that structure the country’s social body.

Outside its jurisdiction, the U.S. busies itself with expanding beyond its own borders. As one of the nations that aspires not only to be a nation, but an empire, it works to extend its influence over matters in every corner of the globe, including places where it was never invited nor announced. The scale and power of force that the U.S. commands offer many ways around international law and the objections of others—whether through secrecy, statecraft, the violence of “intervention,” the nuance of financial leverage, or the exporting of things that carry influence. Regardless of whether the U.S. has any official presence in a given place, it is busy exporting—just as it exports products for markets, it exports models of governance and political rule, attempting to migrate its practices and techniques of power to other places. One does not have to profit in an obvious way; to exercise control and to influence is to shape the geo-political future; a philosophy of translation in which force can compel receptivity where there may otherwise be none.

and everywhere.

Bumper stickers, essays, books and posters like to quote Martin Luther King Jr., including the letter he wrote to segregationist clergy members during one of his moments in jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” the letter reads, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”2 Beyond responding to these clergy members’ accusation of King and others as “outsiders coming in,” King’s statement offers a different philosophy of translation, one that traces the effects of things: “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly,” understanding quite well the futures to which we all are tied.

I do not hear in King’s argument that we should merely concern ourselves with matters that we are not connected to. Instead, I hear that we are already connected, our destinies entwined, where matters of injustice pay no mind to jurisdiction, nation, place nor border, but grow and spread, translating themselves into the logic of one culture after another, becoming normalized, becoming someone’s “option” in solving some problem, becoming unjust.

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I hear in his argument that there is no difference between standing to protect someone else from the abuse of authority, and you protecting yourself—in both cases you are fighting the abuse of authority, and the abuse of authority must always be fought.

authority’s secrets.

Although they emerged around the same time in history, modern imprisonment was not born to facilitate the justice of equality sought by many in modern forms of democracy. Rather, in the language and values of the time, modern prisons were a translation of earlier, more overtly brutal forms of social control into new values of governance. While we are taught that imprisonment follows logically from the civil, legal practices of a democratic society (as a measured punishment, effective deterrent, or rational enforcement of law), those of us whose lives and communities are organized by prison practices are taught very differently by those practices, their institutions, their managers, and their effects on our lives, as they condition an acceptance of exclusion from democracy’s promises.

While historians tell us that the modern prison drew its techniques from monastic principles of isolation—the reflection and time believed necessary for spiritual growth—Michel Foucault qualifies this for us, saying that the result was never an end to the physical violence that had become, by his account, increasingly incompatible with modern discourses on human and civil rights. Instead, it was a movement of that violence out of sight, hidden behind prison walls. While on the level of appearances, it was an advancement toward a civilized, human dignity, as is claimed for prisons to this day, the penitentiary allowed the state to maintain the same violence and achieve the same resulting social control. Indeed, the prison today continues to spark less public outcry, less objection and revolt than would the enactment of state violence in public; for behind its walls remain secrets, stowed away from public knowledge.

growth.

The prison cell as an architecture had already existed—in relatively small jails, dungeons, and other structures for holding people captive; and the modern penitentiary was born by multiplying them from tens and twenties to hundreds and thousands, forming small cities that required the planning, infrastructure, and the inventive institutional design that modern architecture was making possible elsewhere in hospitals, factories, schools, and armies. As these “social scales” of the industrial revolution touched all such institutions, the number

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Anywhere and Everywhere, Translating Captivity

of prisoners to come would be unprecedented. Comparable numbers of the captive and caged had existed only in mass encampments of captured soldiers during war, of refugees following mass expulsions, or in the captive spatializations of slave societies. Since this time, the penitentiary model has only continued to grow and become more normalized, more relied upon as a technology of unequal democracies, as a default solution to poverty, joblessness, and deprivations of education, enfranchisement, medical care and freedom; to the point where, today, the world prison population is a record 10.1 million, with the U.S. setting historical records in both total number and percentage of prisoners per its inhabitants—its prison system has grown 820% since 1970, from 280,000 prisoners to close to 2.3 million.3

crisis.

In an interview about this growth with historian, educator and activist, Ruth Wilson Gilmore in 2000, she said:

Whenever there has been prison expansion in Western Society, it’s come after a major crisis, where a lot of people have been pushed out of old relations of domination and subordination.4

Gilmore gives the example of the British enclosure movements, where the liberation of people from Feudal bondage coincided with modernizing property law, simultaneously pushing them out of their historical lands and into swelling cities, leaving them to find new social relations and economies within which to make a life. Gilmore also offers the example of the emancipation of enslaved populations in the U.S. following its civil war, where similarly, alongside a liberation came a displacement—millions of people having to find new places and ways to live. In both of these instances, peoples whose place in society had been controlled in one way were released from its legal and formal structures, while just as much as they were liberated, they faced the crisis of opportunity for what would come next.

In both cases, the larger societies themselves faced a crisis. The hierarchical orders they had been based upon were now destabilized, as each was stripped of the practices that had kept its most disempowered and subordinated people “in their place” within that order and its economy. As the old practices were translated into new, what followed this larger societal crisis was the birth of both countries’ first mass prison populations—a key institution in allowing their social order and their evolving productive

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forces to be maintained. In post-Magna Carta civil society, this meant the articulation of new legal codes: Victorian and Elizabethan “Poor Laws” in Britain, and “Black Codes” and “Jim Crow Laws” in the U.S.

Gilmore concludes with a third crisis, which in the U.S. begins after World War II and comes to a head in the 1950s and 60s, when communities organized themselves to end Black Codes, Jim Crow, and other forces of segregation and disenfranchisement. As this contributed to a similar crisis in the social order, overt apartheid laws were replaced by criminal codes that appeared emptied of their racial contents.

Rooted in the rhetoric of crime instead of race, this language would soon be accompanied by words of “war” as well: the “War on Drugs,” which accounts for nearly half of today’s radical prison growth, alongside the more general “war on crime”; the “War on Poverty” that had turned into a “war on the poor”; the “war on the border” that brought these forces to the border itself; the “war on gangs,” which accompanies the gentrification movements that have inverted the flows of “white flight” and capital flight; and the “War on Terror,” which has made racial profiling even easier, and has revealed the numerous links between domestic law enforcement, military, and “intelligence” capacities abroad. Today, we see these same racial hierarchies, cultural and religious prejudices mirrored in the prison: half the population is African American, with Black men imprisoned at almost seven times that of White men; Latino men are jailed at almost three times; and American Indian people are among the most highly imprisoned groups in North America. All of this is echoed in an increased use of imprisonment in the spaces of U.S. wars—Iraq, Afghanistan, and particularly Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

this is a crime.

Accordingly, in relation to what we call “crime,” Gilmore’s three examples show how generally, the abstract concepts of law are directed selectively in their application, permitting attacks and controls on specific communities of people without having to appear so on their surface. Just like the prison wall conceals state violence, so can the naming of crime conceal the politics of a law and its prosecution.

In an interview conducted with Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie in 2005, he answered the following when asked, “What is crime?”:

It is so important to understand it is not a clear entity. It is a result of a lot of interaction, a lot of talks, a lot of perceptions, before you come to the conclusion

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Anywhere and Everywhere, Translating Captivity

that this was a crime. You can use simple experience from daily life: when your family members should do something you dislike, your kids take some money—most kids do that now and then — from the parents’ pockets. You could think, well, this was not a right thing. Maybe she needs more pocket money, you could say that this was a protest action; that she wants attention. Or (…) if you came from the outside and it wasn’t your child...you could think, “This was a theft.”

What was the meaning of that particular act? That varies immensely. And this is from the small things to the large things. We know of course that killing, that might be seen as murder, it might be seen as patriotic acts. (…) And it’s so important to keep that sort of freedom in the picture, because then you can understand that you can meet these acts in other ways than the standardized ways of punish and imprisonment.5

By the end of his response, Christie complicates our notion of crime, pointing out the relative degrees of familiarity or estrangement that tend to move someone from "misbehaving” (like a child, neighbor or friend) to “criminal” (the stranger, the Other, the dangerous). Moreover, Christie is also critiquing the conditioned presumption that prison is the logical and only response to the acts we do not like.

Consider that the majority of acts that receive prison as their punishment are committed not out of choice but a lack of choice, a lack of reasonable opportunities for survival that lead to chronic desperation, pain, disorientation and resentment; conditions concentrated in communities that have been systematically undermined for decades and centuries.

Today, our social systems are so broken and undermined—alienating in their massive scales, unloving and unproductive in their disciplinary responses—that by the time most reprehensible acts have been committed, we have no idea what layers of missed opportunities might have changed the course that led to them, let alone read into them the histories of injustice at play.

Instead, the rhetoric of crime buries such complex chains of cause and effect deep within the abstract figure of the criminal, suturing, as racism does, the ugliness of an act to the mythical “nature” of a person or group. And as racial, economic, ethnic, or immigrant-based prejudices are given their discursive expression in law, they are given spatial expression in the prison.

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good will.

It is not the job of bureaucrats to grapple with the contradictions of history, the biases of economic structure or the antagonisms of social inequality. While the state claims to make the administration of justice objective, it can just as easily appropriate what would otherwise be theorized and developed throughout houses and streets with a more intimate accountability, and with a stake in the health of its outcomes. Taking the theorization of justice out of the hands of local community members stultifies our ability to respond to difficult situations and contradictions, leaving us instead with oversimplified narratives that play toward vengeance and vilification, feeding our prejudices and our investments in the inequalities that enrich us.

While one can comprehend possible “just” uses and outcomes of imprisonment, where a jail cell lets a drunk sober up or a violent rage to cool off, or where one bent more generally on destruction in life can transform that life into a citizenship more compatible with those of their neighbors, locating such cases without more far reaching and broad, devastating consequences is difficult. Each would be easier to find in television shows and the general myths of the criminal justice system than in actual practice, for beyond their objective capacity for mass containment, they hold within them the internment, disappearance, and captivity for which they were invented.

Ultimately, the question becomes less about good or bad intentions in a jail’s administration, and more about the capacities that we are building. Once you have the capacity for large-scale domination—be it an army, a police force or a prison—it doesn’t take someone interested in domination to put it to that use. More common will be the well-intentioned, or merely competent administrators, who only have to do their job to realize the capacities already built implicitly into its form.

free markets.

One of the ways that older hierarchies remap themselves onto today’s larger world is in the uneven relationships between wealthier and poorer nations, where crises old and new are aggravated and enflamed. As the more powerful nations compete for influence beyond their borders—for access to raw materials, markets for export, for cheap labor, airspace and geography—we see lending schemes, trade agreements and the threat of force coercing the restructuring of the local economies and social and governance policies

22

Anywhere and Everywhere, Translating Captivity

of others. Throughout the so-called developing world, we see the same dismantling of social programs, education and welfare-state institutions that have accompanied the prison boom in the U.S., while nations drop their environmental regulations, labor laws, trade barriers and other protections for local people, land and sovereignty.

As new markets form across these borders, facilitating the movement of goods, services and discourses, hierarchies of mobility and free movement flourish. Corporate and non-governmental entities migrate throughout the globalized world in ways that vast majorities of people, including their unions and social organizations, are unable. As a result, we see the same crises and social instability that Gilmore warns about, as people are pushed out of their social relations and old ways of life, remaining stuck without the safety nets that might otherwise have caught them.

This creates perfect conditions of translatability—receptivity for the logics of mass imprisonment, where the agents of prison growth look for expanding markets, peddling criminalization and incarceration as cutting edge methods to deal with mounting instability. This has only been exacerbated since the early 2000s, as the “War on Terror” has offered an additional set of political language and legal techniques to crack down on ethnic, religious and economic minorities. Thus, the export of the “crime control,” “moral outrage,” and “anti-terror” movements pays big money for lectures by former police chiefs, military, and public officials who help to translate their terms to local conditions, as well as to private consulting firms, to corporations that seek new markets for their weapons, border technologies and high security building materials, and to those cycling military technologies into carceral industries and the leasing of security personnel.

anywhere everywhere.

Since the end of the Cold War, the massive prison growth of the U.S. has been followed most closely by that of Eastern Europe. Russia has the closest incarceration rate to that of the U.S., followed by the Baltic States and South Africa, each of which are in the midst of decades-long crises in their historical social order. Across their differences of border and place, as well as any location that a reader of this text sits, can be found these continuities—uninterrupted practices and capacities for social control that link jurisdictions and lineages of domination. And for those interested in research, they can easily be traced according to the lobbyists, consultants, contractors, and “development” loans that travel there and circulate through their capitals.

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In the same interview with Nils Christie, he concluded:

And you can ask, yeah, what’s wrong? That is the question of our values. Do we accept that our society represents us with that large amount of prisoners? We could in theory say there were many nice ideals included in the fascist and Nazi and state socialist ideas, but I would of course, first and foremost, evaluate those systems by their prison populations: the concentration camps, the gulags. And it is a tendency to talk so much about the horror of the gulags that we forget to look at our own systems—what are we creating now with this enormous increase in prison population in many countries. Is it acceptable then, if you like our economic-political system, can it still be acceptable that you still have a cost of incarceration like this? This is the other side of the coin…6

from here to the reader.

From my place of writing to your place of reading: our differences may be ones of geography and location, nation and state, the scale and density of our neighborhoods, city or countryside, and the sameness or diversity of the cultures that fills them; there may be differences of resources and capital, language, the cosmic forces we believe organize our world, and the different proximities to war that we possess, just as we each hold different histories that have arrived us here.

During research for a recent project in Turkey, it was suggested I look into the growing numbers of women entering Turkey’s prison system. This, it was explained to me, was the result of gender politics and Islam, women fighting back against what has been characterized in Western media as “honor killings”—a religious difference posed a fundamental distinction from how women now constitute one of the fastest growing prison populations in the U.S. But after initial research, interviews with women and advocates, and conversations with a group of women in a local prison, it became clear that the common denominator in many of these cases was not religion. It appeared instead to be exactly what drove many women into prison in the U.S.—defending themselves against violence from spouses and family members in the context of poverty.

Across our differences of place, beneath the distinctions that—like language—each place colors its circumstances, there is our common relationship to what happens to us—our “single garment of destiny” is woven by real, material connections that the play of differences and the limits of jurisdiction always seem to erase.

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1 Walter Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” in: Illuminations, Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968).

2 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” < http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html> Accessed 14 May 2014.

3 Roy Walmsley, “World Prison Population List: 10th edition,” International Centre for Prison Studies, University of Essex, October 2013 <http://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/prisonstudies.org/files/resources/downloads/wppl_10.pdf>.

4 See Corrections, a feature documentary produced by Ashley Hunt, 2001.

5 See A World Map: In which We See…, a mapping and video project by Ashley Hunt (www.aworldmap.com). Also read any of the many important works by Nils Christie, including Crime Control as Industry (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) and A Suitable Amount of Crime (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

6 Ibid.

If we consider the rise in imprisonment practices throughout the world not as many individual fires, but as one great fire that branches out, stoking global conditions of crisis, networks of captivity that facilitate the subordination required for the progress of global capitalism, then what politics of translation begin to become possible? What politics of translation become necessary?

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Penguin Books, 1963.

Christie, Nils. Crime Control as Industry. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Christie, Nils. A Suitable Amount of Crime. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.

Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete?. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.

Davis, Angela Y. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Second Vintage Books Edition, 1995.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. London: University of California Press, 2007.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Anywhere and Everywhere, Translating Captivity

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HUMAN NATURE By Lilly Lampe

In Human Nature and Conduct (1922), American philosopher John Dewey writes, “By killing an evil-doer or shutting him up behind stone walls, we are enabled to forget both him and our part in creating him. Society excuses itself by laying the blame on the criminal.”1 In this statement, Dewey emphasizes society’s tendency to vilify the convict, an act which both absolves others from their role—indirect, institutional, or otherwise—in the creation of criminals, and effectively excludes the criminal from society.

Today there are over 200,000 people in federal prisons and over one million in state prisons in America.2 There are over 3,000 inmates on death row.3 These numbers represent a growing segment of the population, and the ramifications of this increase cannot be ignored. Yaelle Amir’s exhibition To Shoot a Kite features works that confront the abject state of the incarcerated.

In prison speak, “to shoot a kite” means to send a message. In this exhibition, the message is not a statement, it is a plea. It asks the viewer to pause for consideration of a growing, disaffected segment of the population. It asks the viewer to listen to the stories of incarceration of the innocent and guilty. And it asks the viewer to have compassion and be open to empathy. The works in To Shoot a Kite—consisting of artworks, community endeavors, and projects that combine the two—invite the viewer to approach the position of the inmate, whether on death row, in solitary, or with freedoms like access to classes, in order to sample the variety of experiences within the prison system.

None of the works in To Shoot a Kite present explicit images of prison conditions; instead, viewers are called upon to imagine this environment for themselves. Whereas works like Andy Warhol’s Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964), a series of printed mug shots from the New York Police Department, revel in the titillation and possible celebrity of criminality, the pieces in To Shoot a Kite confront the humanism of lesser-known inmates through their own desires, needs, and aspirations. In this way, the exhibition evokes empathy for psychological reasons rather than physical suffering, and rejects a focus on the crimes—whether politically motivated and noble or extraordinarily horrific—in favor of attention to the individual. The viewer is given access to the prisoner’s imaginings of a different space or life and, in understanding the goals of the prisoner, comes to understand the prisoner’s present state.

Two Last Supper-related works in To Shoot a Kite effectively act as bookends for the exhibition. The first, Julie Green’s Last Supper, an ongoing project begun in 1999, presents images of the foodstuffs of last meal requests painted in blue on china plates. In cases where a prisoner refused the last meal, his or her final words are painted instead.

26

Human Nature

These works refer to the memorial aspect of decorative plates and as such highlight these otherwise impersonal selections, which range from birthday cake to fried chicken. The focus on these choices hints at the background and preferences of the inmate. For many, the last meal is the only time their preferences will be heard by their jailors, and this is the final chance to revisit a childhood favorite or, in the case of the birthday cake, try a commonplace food for the first time, as indicated in the text on Green’s plate. These images create an unconventional portrait that describes both personality and condition, with no other physical or factual detail. Compare this to Dread Scott’s Lockdown series (2000-2004), in which the artist interviewed and photographed inmates, either while serving time or after their release, to create a more traditional style of portrait. Scott met with inmates, conveyed to them his opinions against the prison system, photographed them, and then conducted interviews about the subjects’ personal experiences that led to their incarceration. In sharp contrast to mug shots, these gelatin silver portraits show the prisoners in rare moments of relaxation. Scott succeeds in presenting these men as they’d like to be seen, and uses his camera as a tool to reveal an idealized self-image. The final portraits are displayed along with edited selections of audio from the interviews, allowing each subject the agency and platform to share his side of the story.

If Scott’s photographs ask us to see an inmate’s best self, or at the very least identify with a desire to present a best self, Jackie Sumell’s project The House that Herman Built (Herman’s House) shows a different, equally relatable idealization. Herman Wallace spent over forty years in solitary confinement in a six-by-nine-foot cell. Sumell and Wallace began a dialogue in the last decade of Wallace’s life, in which they designed Wallace’s dream house. The desire for a better living situation is universal; however, in Wallace’s case it speaks to deeper desires for freedom.

Wallace’s conviction was overturned three days before he died, making his story all the more heartrending. Whether the prisoner is innocent or guilty, the conditions of solitary confinement are horrifying, which is why projects like Supermax Subscriptions can be so powerful. This project, organized by Temporary Services, Tamms Year Ten, and Sarah Ross, asked volunteers to donate magazine subscriptions to inmates at Tamms, a supermax prison that closed in 2013, in which every inmate was in permanent solitary confinement. This simple act gave these isolated individuals a tether to the rest of the world; each article and picture evokes a sense of society and illuminates their dreams and imaginings of outside life at a time when their immediate world has shrunk to a small cell.

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The power of imaginary space for prisoners is emphasized in works like Jennifer Egan’s novel The Keep. In the novel, an incarcerated protagonist named Ray is woken up by his cellmate, Davis, who is anxious to show him a box of rubbish that he claims is a radio. Ray thinks, “What if it actually does what Davis says? And in that split second I go from pretending straight into believing—it’s like all the pretending made me believe, except that doesn’t make sense, because pretending and believing are opposites. I don’t know what happens. Maybe it’s this place. Maybe if old fruit can be next week’s wine and a toothbrush can slit a throat…maybe a box of hair is a radio. Maybe in here it’s true.”4

Egan strips down the condition of inmates, alluding to the resourcefulness that turns toiletry items into weapons and any available foodstuff into hooch, but also to a human need for agency that turns the act of imagining into an effort towards emotional freedom. In this episode, Egan reveals the impact of the introduction of possibility, even an imagined possibility, into a life of confinement. In a firmly limited real space, boundless imaginary space becomes all the more powerful, giving projects like Supermax Subscriptions and Herman’s House great significance.

This impact goes beyond the extremes of solitary confinement. Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project (P+NAP) offers arts and humanities classes to inmates at Statesville Prison, at a time when most state-funded prison education programs and libraries are being defunded. Ashley Hunt’s Corrections documentary provides a foil to P+NAP, as it addresses the increasing privatization of prisons and the results for both inmates and neighboring communities. Hunt’s research reveals that one in four black men is in prison, on parole, or probation, and new prisons are being built in rural communities with the argument that prisons create jobs and will revive depressed towns. This and other information Hunt pulls together shows the growing effects the prison system will have on society and presents the profit-driven motivations behind an increase in jails. In an exhibition that asks viewers to put themselves in the place of the individual inmate, this documentary casts a dark shadow by revealing that there are many for whom an inmate is just a number in a budget sheet, whose loss of freedom means greater profit.

If that’s a tough idea to swallow, imagine having to eat what you know will be your last meal. The other last supper piece in To Shoot a Kite, Lucky Pierre’s Final Meals (2003), asked volunteers to consume recreations of last meals culled from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s archive. In the resulting videos, these actors serve as avatars for both viewer and inmate, bridging the divide between them. With every bite, the actor must portray a confrontation with the appalling enormity of pending execution, and the viewer

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This essay was written as part of the Young Art Critics Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. For additional arts-related writing, please visit on-verge.org

Human Nature

must play along in this grisly game. If we pause to allow the emotional impact to sink in, this meal and the circumstances around it become a gruesome ritual. If, as Dewey writes, society punishes criminals in order to alleviate the guilt of having created the circumstances of the criminal, then the Last Supper, solitary confinement, and other inventions of the justice system seem a gross form of torture. To Shoot a Kite asks this question and more, by presenting works that harness the power of imaginary space to convey very real problems.

1 John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology. Project Gutenberg EBook #41386, Nov. 17 2012 <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41386/41386-h/41386-h.htm> Accessed 01 April, 2014, 18.

2 Peter Wagner and Leah Sakala, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie,” Prison Policy Initiative, 12 March 2014 <http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie.html> (see page 12).

3 “Death Penalty: Death Row Population Size and Characteristics,” Death Penalty Focus, <http://www.deathpenalty.org/article.php?id=86> Accessed 01 April, 2014

4 Jennifer Egan, The Keep (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), 106.

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ARTISTS

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JULIE GREEN

The Last Supper1999-ongoingClockwise from left:

Indiana 05 May 2007 Pizza and birthday cake shared with 15 family and friends. A prison official said “He told us he never had a birthday cake so we ordered a birthday cake for him.”

Florida 15 February 2012 Two pork chop cutlets, two eggs sunny side up, two pieces of toast, a slice of cherry pie, a pint of butter pecan ice cream, a pint of orange juice and a pint of milk.

Texas 21 September 2011 Two chicken-fried steaks, one pound of barbecued meat, a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger, a meat-lover's pizza, three fajitas, an omelet, a bowl of okra, one pint of Blue Bell Ice Cream, some peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts and three root beers (after inmate didn’t eat any of this meal, Texas ends final meal request option).

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According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since the death penalty was restored in the U.S. in 1976, there have been 1,379 state-sanctioned executions, and 3,095 people remain on death row (as of May 2014). All 32 states with capital punishment extend last-meal requests to death row inmates save for Texas, the state where the most executions take place, which ended this practice in 2011. These meal requests reveal a personal perspective of the prisoners, highlighting their individuality and shining a light on their race, region, and class. Since 1999, Julie Green has been painting last-meal requests on secondhand ceramic plates. With the technical assistance of Toni Acock, she has painted 600 meals to date, and plans to add fifty plates a year until capital punishment is abolished. Each of the plates comprising The Last Supper tells a prisoner’s story—their favorite meal, something they never got to eat, and in some cases—abstaining from eating the meal as a form of resistance. This ritual serves as a humanizing representation of these individuals—a kind of memorial—where their final choice is permanently recorded. While each state has its own regulations—California offers restaurant take-out meals, while other states limit choices to what is already available in the prison kitchen—we are able to learn some common preferences, such as red meat vs. green vegetables. This work is also rife with conflict—for one, food represents sustenance for so many, and here it is given to someone who is hours away from death. Another claim is regarding how someone who caused much pain to others can be given any choice at all, and further yet, have it be immortalized in this project. In the fifteen years that Green has been painting these meal requests, she has sought to capture the humanity of these individuals who have been condemned to a sentence that the majority of Western countries have abolished. In so doing, she gives permanence to the final moments of normalcy these death row inmates had before the system implemented its final act.

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The Last Supper, 1999-ongoing. Installation view of 357 plates in the 2009 exhibition Counter Intelligence, California State University, Los Angeles.

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34

...profit from getting high ratings. Crime brings good ratings since it’ssensational, and people like to watch it (“COPS,” high speed car chases).In the past ten years, crime has decreased, but the media has coveredcrime 6 times as much, making it appear that crime has increased. To bemore sensational, the media exploits racial fears & the fear of poor people,feeding the racism & classism within the criminal justice system itself, andlessening our objections to aggressive policing & mass imprisonment.

P O L I T I C I A N S(tough on crime!)

S E G R E G ATION, EXCLUSION FROM POLITICS, RESOURCES & POWER;

D A I LY V IO L ENC E AG A I NS T P E OP L E O F CO L OR , W OM EN , P O ORCOMMUNITIES, IMMIGRANT & QUEER COMMUNITIES, MARGINALIZED GROUPS

...play a large part in expanding theprison system, using the “fear of crime”to win votes. But the “fear of crime” isshorthand for racism: the fear of Black &B r own people & poor people hav i n gpower; a “fear” that became a politicaltool during the Civil Rights era. Today,being “tough on crime” helps maintainthose same structures of segregation andinequality, helping to fulfill the agendas ofbig business, real estate developers,police & prison guards. While politiciansget big $$ to flex their muscles & inventnew ways to lock more people up, we areleft out of the political process, scared ofour neighbors & afraid for our jobs. PRISON

CONSTRUCTIONC O M PA N I E S

...make between $10 million & $500m i l l i o n to build a prison; the more

prisons they build, the more money theymake. They contribute money throughPACs for “tougher” laws that increasethe demand for new prisons, and pay

big $$ to the politicians who w i l lpromise to build them.

...want more control over resources &political power, and with $$ (lobbying & pay-offs) they influence government policy to getit. They compete by paying less for workers,and use unemployment & insecurity to bringdown our wages. They refuse to give taxesfor social welfare, but demand our tax–$$for corporate welfare, investing instead inbuilding new prisons. Prisons make theproblems they cause “disappear” by blaming& criminalizing the poor instead of blam-ing the policies that make them poor.

BIG INDUSTRY &C O R P O R AT I O N S

P O O RE D U CAT I O N,D ROP OUTS

U N E M P L OY M E N T,E X P L O I TATION &

OV E R – WO R K

...is money given to big corporations, as tax breaks, subsidies or “hand–outs.”Corporations are the biggest recipient of “government hand–outs,” and eachdollar they get is a dollar that won’t get spent on youth, on the elderly, onhousing, job training, health care, medicine, poverty & homeless prevention,nutrition or drug treatment, environmental protection and all the things thatkeep people truly safe, healthy and out of prison. What used to be invested incommunities is now invested in police & prisons. Corporate welfare instead ofsocial welfare de–stabilizes communities & pushes people toward prison.

C O R P O R ATE WELFA R E

LAWENFORCEMENT

...profit from growing, and in order to grow, they needus to think that they (and only they) can guarantee our“safety.” In the face of inequality & poverty, their role is tomaintain social control and the appearance of “order,” often atthe cost of the public’s real safety. They hold great influence overpoliticians, and have big public relations departments to gain influenceover us. They create propaganda like the TV show ‘COPS’ & release their own news stories to themedia, sensationalizing crime & justifying their desire for more power, bigger budgets & technology.

POLICE BRUTA L I T Y

NO MENTA LH E A LTH T R E AT M E N T

THINK TA N K S...are “idea people” for the system. Their job is to inventnew ideas and, like speech writers for politicians, ‘spin’them into policies the public will like, even if they’llactually be harmful. They make undemocratic policylook like democracy, racism look like justice, destroyingthe environment look like progress, weapons & abusesof our Rights look like our “ p r o t e c t i o n . ” “ Z e r oTolerance,” “Welfare Reform,” “Urban Revitalization” &others were invented by think tanks like the ManhattanInstitute, the Heritage Foundation, the Brookings Institute,American Legislative Exchange Council & the ReasonPublic Policy Institute. Owned by weapons builders,prison builders, privatizers & real estate developers, theylead the way in mass imprisonment, the War on Drugs &the War on Terrorism; militarizing borders & criminalizingimmigrants; gentrifying cities & driving out the poor;destroying welfare & privatizing everything—from healthcare to prisons & schools. They push for corporatewelfare, de–regulation & anything to help big businessmonopolize our r e s o u r c e s , labor & political system.

NO HEALT HCA R E

MEDICINE COSTSTOO MUCH!

LIMITED AC C E S STO RESOURCES

M A L N U T R I T I O NURBAN DEVELOPERS

( g e n t r i f i c at i o n )...make their money by “developing”cities for commercial business & newwealthy residents, and that meansdriving out & locking up “the poor.”Whether it’s public housing, parks &community gardens, or homeless,u n e m p l oyed & retired residents,whether it’s locally owned stores oranything in the way of big moneymaking, they buy it up, arrest it, destroyor imprison it. They work with banks &the city, who also profit from morewealthy residents, tourists & shopperscoming in. Together, they underminecommunity relations & economies, pullout resources & drive down propertyvalues (‘red–lining’), and provokeviolence through “aggressive policing”:h a r a s s m e n t , brutality & profiling.

POLLUTION & E N V I RO N M E N TA L

H A Z A R D S

...depend on the number of members in their unions:more members = more power. They push for harsherlaws because that means more prisoners; more prisonersmean more prisons, more jobs, and their unions GROW.Guards are politically powerful & push for lawsthat make new things ‘criminal,’ that will keepmore people locked up for longer & make lifeharder on prisoners. They push laws that makethemselves less accountable for brutalizingprisoners, ones that attack prisoners’rights and access to their families,libraries & rehab programs, hopingto keep prisoners locked up longer,& coming back sooner. T h e ysupport victims’ rights groupsand use them as a front to getpublic s y m p athy & consent.

...work like hotels: the more ‘beds’ they fill, the more $$ they make. They are builtby corporations when the state is locking up so many people that it runs out of

beds, helping the system to grow even more; & to profit, thesecorporations need the system to keep growing, & continuallylobby for new laws & tough–on–crime politicians who’ll lock upmore people for longer. They also fund Think Tanks who push

for more prisons. Financed by our tax $$, they pocket asmuch as they can by cutting services, programs, & using

prisoners’ labor on the facilities. They turn prisonersinto commodities & products, and like public prisons,

have high levels of abuse, violence & neglect,making peoples’ lives more dangerous than ‘safe.’

...profit from warehousing people. T h e ywarehouse the people society has no place for &

discriminates against, while disappearing the neglect andabuses they suffer. Prisons are warehouses for: racism,

s e x i s m , h o m o p h o b i a , p o v e r t y, u n e m p l oy m e n t , i l l i t e r a cy,a d d i c t i o n , h o m e l e s s n e s s , public & mental health crises,environmental destruction, government & corporate corruption, andother things that make people powerless. A prison’s funding isbased on the number of prisoners it holds & the “security level” itprovides, so “profit” comes by getting more prisoners, buildingmore cells & u n i t s , and r e - classifying prisoners as “ m o r edangerous.” Instead of eliminating injustice, this makes more

room for injustice to be waged on the outside. Prisons areviolence & confront problems with violence. They teach

us that violence is how we solve our conflicts,send violence back into our communities,

cripple our families and drain ourpolitical power...

PRISONS & JAILS

BIG AG R I – B U S I N E S S...is ‘corporate’ farming. It has taken over most of the farming and agriculturein the U.S. & abroad, putting small farmers out of business & replacingworkers with high powered machinery, while increasing the pollution we face& depleting the health of the food we get. The resulting loss of jobs andresources has forced many poor, rural towns into wanting a prison,thinking it will bring jobs—jobs guarding the similarly poor from urban areas.

V I C T I M S ’ RIGHTS GRO U P S...came out in the last 15 years. They say, “why do ‘criminals’ haveall the rights? What about the rights of victims?” They often includepeople who’ve suffered tragedy, lost loved ones & property, andare frustrated by the unaccountability of the justice system. Butthey are usually organized & paid for by law enforcement groups& ‘tough–on–crime’ pushers, who organize their pain into a voicefor vengeance & political gain. Both prison guards & police exploittheir tragedies to extend their influence over politicians, pushingharsher sentences, dehumanization, & distraction from the trueproblems on the outside—the injustices of the larger system.

THE WAR ON DRUGS...offers big $$ and resources to law enforcement ifthey police & imprison for drugs. Similar to new lawsthat encourage police to target immigrants & youth,the War on Drugs offers federal grant $$ and allowspolice to sell property they seize during drug busts,which become resources, incentives & excuses toprofile, harass, brutalize & imprison. Largely designedby Think Ta n k s , it has enabled unprecedentedcontrol over poor communities & communities ofcolor through a constant police presence, surveillance& violence against countless youth, homeless, jobless,and mothers who’ve been pushed off of Welfare.

P R I VATE PRISONS (“for-profits”)

PRISON GUARD UNIONS

The PRISON INDUSTRIALCOMPLEX (the PIC) is theinteraction of all the interests who help expand the prison system, some i n t e n t i o n a l l y,some c o i n c i d e n t a l l y, but all for reasons other than our safety and justice. Most ofthem influence prison growth for reasons of their own p r o f i t : some profit in terms of

c a s h – $ $ , others in terms of political pow e r, control of resources & property, or goodTV rat i n g s . Some profit from the business of imprisonment, others from having peopleout of their way, “ c r i m i n a l i z e d ” and locked up. I t ’s a system where p r o f i t is more

important than p e o p l e ; where people ares p l i t along the lines of r a c e , gender &

c u l t u r e so that their labor, resources & p ower can be exploited & monopolized, a n dprisons make invisible the damage done along the way. Is it a conspiracy? It doesn’th ave to be—as this chart show s , each group’s own interests are set up to G R O W. . .

HOUSING CRISIS

A D D I C T I O N

THE MEDIA

PRIMARYINFLUENCES: Thepolice & prisonsystem itself;those who profitdirectly fromlocking up morepeople, buildingnew prisons &getting new jobs.

SECONDARYINFLUENCES: One stepremoved fromprisons, supplyingthem with prison-ers, s e rvices &g o o d s . They profitindirectly bylocking up morepeople.

IDEOLOGICALINFLUENCES:Influence howwe think a b o u tdifferent groupsof people, crime,p o v e rty & prisons;they use “crime”as a tool todivide, to blame,& to justifyinequalities.

E N V I R O N M E N TA LINFLUENCES:Create theenvironment ofinequality &violence thatpush p e o p l et o w a rd prison;they exploit,destroy and robcommunities ofprogress anddevelopment.

P R O B L E M SC A U S E D BYINEQUALITY:the results ofpowerlessness,social control &the ENVIRONMENTAL

INFLUENCES oncommunities;‘prisons on theoutside’, prob-lems that gountreated or getcriminalized & fed into prisons.

INFLUENCESON

PRISONGROWTH

(Key to chart)

EXCLUSION FROM POLITICS,D I S E N F R A N C H I S E M E N T

P ROSECUTING AT TO R N E YS , DA s...are all elected, based on how many “convictions” they get(putting people in prison or giving the death penalty, etc.). Sothey often exploit the tragedies of crime–victims to advancetheir records, while driving the public’s fear of crime throughthe media. They get extra convictions by pushing naive, ‘smalltime’ defendants into plea–bargains, and through the DistrictAttorneys’ Association, constantly push for more power & newways to convict people: harsher, ‘big headline’ sentences,‘mandatory minimum’ laws like ‘3 Strikes,’ or new crimes togive the death penalty to. They push for longer prison time &discourage effective alternatives to advance their own careers.

V I O L E N C E

P R I S O NI N D U S T R I E S

...are like any other industry:they need to ‘grow.’ They sellthe products that go into thebuilding, maintaining & servic-ing of prisons. Everything thatfeeds, clothes, houses, caresfor & educates prisoners aresold for profit. But profitsrequire growth, and in prisons,that means more prisoners. Sothey give campaign $$$ topoliticians & PACs, to passnew “tough” laws and lock more people up for longer.

DAY TO DAY INSECURITY

H O M E L E S S N E S S...are extremely overcrowded. Judges rarely face therealities that they ‘judge’ each day, nor do they knowthe realities of the prisons they send people to. Peoplewithout resources spend months & years just waitingfor trial, and most never get any real defense. In orderto speed through cases, the courts push defendants to“plea–bargain,” where, if they waive their right to trial,they’ll get a shorter sentence. This manipulation floodsprisons with people who lack resources & don’t knowtheir rights; People of Color are 3 times as likely to getharsher sentences than Whites for the same crime.

C O U RT S

THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

P O L I T I CAL AC T I O NC O M M I T T E E S

R ACIAL PRO F I L I N G

D I S C O N T E N T& RESISTA N C E

...(PACs) are for political lobbying by ‘special interest groups.’ Whilethere are limits to how much money a group can contribute to apolitician directly, they can contribute more $$ indirectly through a PAC.PACs usually represent a particular issue, industry or interest: prisonguards and law enforcement both have their own PACs; private prisoncorporations, prison builders & the industry also give big $$ throughPACs to influence politicians and push new “tough” laws, to build newprisons and end parole, education & rehab programs. PACs are anotherway the PIC monopolizes our political system & profits off of crime. S U RV E I L L A N C E

...lend money to the state for building new prisons: MILLIONS OF $$$! Since the 1980s,we taxpayers have refused to pay for building more prisons, so now the state goes aroundus by getting bank loans, which we still pay back later in hidden taxes, plus interest! Thebanks profit millions while the state grows its prison system without our approval.

INVESTMENT BANKS

FEAR & HATRED OFI M M I G R A N T S :X E N O P H O B I A

RURAL ECONOMICD E V E L O P E R S

...are in charge of bringing jobs & industry to rural areas.Farms have closed, factories & plants have left the country,and many are left behind, unemployed & desperate. While thestate used to offer such communities public projects, buildingroads, parks or dams, it now offers prisons for “economicdevelopment.” Communities who try to profit from a prisonhelp the PIC to grow, but are really victims of the PIC, sinceprisons inevitably under–develop communities rather thandevelop, weakening local economies & increasing theirdependence on the state & the imprisonment of others.

This poster is a part of the

CORRECTIONS DOCUMENTARY PROJECTe m a i l : m a i l @ c o r r e c t i o n s p r o j e c t . c o m

w w w. c o r r e c t i o n s p r o j e c t . c o m

D E B T, DEBT & MORE DEBT

Prison Map: “The Prison Industrial Complex” 2003 Printed poster

ASHLEY HUNT

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Ashley Hunt’s Corrections Documentary Project is an ongoing body of work about the prison industrial complex, primarily examining the politics and economics of the massive increase of the U.S. prisoner population since the 1970s. The project is comprised of nine videos and two maps that reveal the manner in which this system helps structure and preserve the racial and economic hierarchies of today’s society. CORRECTIONS is Hunt’s first film in the series, demonstrating the process and reasoning for prison privatization and the resulting implications to our society. Out of this film grew a series of short videos that explore in detail related issues and grassroots efforts to oppose the system. Along with the two maps, the project demonstrates the direct link between motivations of political and economic profit and mass incarceration, where prisons are offered by the states to solve problems of poverty and the state’s own failure in both the commonly rural communities where new prisons are built and the typically urban communities from which prisoners most often come. Among these “Footnotes” on CORRECTIONS are three videos looking at prisons at different moments in time: past (Attica: Roots of Resistance), present (A Prison in the Fields), and future (Lockdowns Up). Two videos based in New Orleans tell the story of a grassroots campaign to shut down the Tallulah Correctional Facility, an infamous youth prison in northern Louisiana. An Interview with Curtis Muhammad is an absorbing conversation with a labor and civil rights activist who discusses unions, criminalization, globalization, and the obligations of artists to those for whom they are advocating. Two videos documenting the 2005 Southern Conference of Critical Resistance portray both its organizing effort and the conference itself, promoting the abolition of the prisons as a solution for societal inequalities. I Won’t Drown on the Levee & You Ain’t Gonna’ Break My Back tells a story of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in which the local Sheriff refused to evacuate the Orleans Parish Prison, leaving prisoners to drown in their cells.

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Corrections, 2001

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Protest signs at community meeting, Lexington, Mississippi, 2004

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With 515 and counting, Texas has executed the most prisoners since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S in 1976. Up until 2011, the state gave the condemned inmates the opportunity to request a customized final meal. Following a lavish request by a prisoner, and his ultimate refusal to eat it, Texas abolished the “last meal” tradition. Up until that point, however, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) made the details of the 310 meals known to the public. In their ongoing project Final Meals, the collaborative Lucky Pierre has been performing and filming people eating these meal requests. In the early stages of the work, Lucky Pierre members prepared and ate the meals, and later on cooked them for others. In its current iteration, they create a singular and contemplative performance for one, as they ask a volunteer to sit with a meal prepared for them for 25 minutes while being filmed from above. They choose to either eat the food or not. The volunteers are later invited to have a communal dinner, while watching and discussing the growing archive of video footage of the performances. By setting up this intimate configuration where a free person is faced with sitting with the final request of an individual whose death was sanctioned by the state, Lucky Pierre creates a living monument for the deceased. The collaborative takes the somewhat boastful act of the TDCJ of publicizing the meal requests, and turns it into a moving archive of portraits that display not only the personal preferences of the condemned, but also glimpses into aspects of the life they once lived.

LUCKY PIERRE

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Final Meal Request #309

Final Meal Request #310

Video stills

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Final Meal Request #307Performance view

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Final Meal Request #304Detail

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PRISON AND NEIGHBORHOOD ART PROJECT (P+NAP)

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Among the many U.S. policies and laws of the 1980s and 90s that contributed to the current age of mass incarceration in the U.S. is a 1994 law signed by Bill Clinton that eliminates access to Pell Grants for prisoners, thus forcing the vast majority of college programs in prisons to close down. This was done despite studies showing that education in prison helps former prisoners find employment and reduces recidivism. It was left to nonprofits, universities and individuals to fill the gap this new policy created. Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project (P+NAP) is one such program organized by a coalition of college educators, artists and writers in Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum-security state facility in Greater Chicago. Despite having a strong history of art and education programs in the 1970s, Stateville holds over 1,800 men who have had few education opportunities and limited access to a library for over a decade. P+NAP is a visual and literary arts initiative that connects teaching artists and scholars with incarcerated men through semester-long humanities classes, workshops and guest lectures. Collaboration is at the core of the program, where free and incarcerated artists work together to critically communicate to a broad public the issues with imprisonment, isolation, and social segregation. The program has created an arts and literary library in the prison, invites artists, activists and researchers to give guest lectures, and holds art and poetry classes. It also organizes exhibitions and events beyond Stateville in an effort to draw a link between life on the inside and its implications to those on the outside. In the past year, P+NAP started artist and writer residency programs with the intent to combine inside and outside skills to produce work around a single topic. The first resident, supported by Jane Addams Hull House, was artist Damon Locks who collaborated with incarcerated men on the concept and meaning of “Free Time” in an un-free place. The ultimate goal of P+NAP is for free and incarcerated collaborators to join efforts in propagating a cultural shift among the public in the understanding of the prisoner population and the isolated conditions it has endured for much too long.

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PREVIOUS PAGECarlos Santos, 2014Animation frames

ABOVEJoseph Dole, 2014Animation frames

LEFTWilliam Jones, 2014Animation frames

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DREAD SCOTT

Lockdown2000-2004Gelatin silver prints and audio. Variable dimensions

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Lockdown is a project that presents a fragment of the population of 2.4 million people locked away in U.S. prisons. The eleven photo portraits and interview excerpts were recorded during one—hour visits Dread Scott made to a prison and at a meeting with youth who had been through the system. The project depicts a group that is acutely aware of how they got to the position they are in, as well as of the politics driving mass incarceration. The men’s photographs and voices speak to their race and class—often Black and Latino and typically from impoverished backgrounds—pertinently depicting the prison policy and inner-workings of American society today. Their stories outline a judicial system that offers little solutions to those trapped in the cycle of incarceration. Most individuals who have served time are released from prison into a different type of social confinement—one that discriminates them on the basis of their past, as well as their race and class. Local and federal policies restrict their ability to get public assistance, an education, and steady employment. Lockdown serves as evidence, and also as a necessary platform for discussion and debate where voices from the inside are amplified, rather than silenced.

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JACKIE SUMELLFor over a decade, Jackie Sumell has been working tirelessly to bring awareness to the detrimental effects of solitary confinement. Widely used in 44 states, 80,000 prisoners are currently locked away for 23-24 hours a day in a 6x9 foot cell without any human contact for months or even years. In Louisiana, the state with the highest incarceration rate in the nation, the last surviving member of the Angola 3, Albert Woodfox, has earned the dubious title of spending the most time in solitary—an astounding 42 years. He was joined until recently by fellow Angola 3 member Herman Wallace, who spent 41 years in solitary confinement until his conviction was overturned and he was freed three days prior to his death from liver cancer. In 2003, Sumell sent Wallace a letter asking: "What kind of a house does a man who has lived in a 6 ft. x 9 ft. cell for over 30 years dream of?" This sparked a correspondence between the two through which Wallace describes in detail what his future home might include. This communication evolved into a strong friendship that served as the heart of Sumell’s campaign to not only build Wallace’s dream home, but also fight for his release from prison. Owing to the resolute efforts of his supporters, Wallace died a free man on October 4, 2013. While working to build Herman’s House to serve as a community center, Sumell has created projects in support of the campaign to abolish the use of indefinite solitary confinement.

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Herman's Drawing, 2003

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LEFTThe House that Herman Built, 2011 Installation, Warsaw

OPPOSITECAD Drawing of Herman’s house by Dan Hatch Studios

Installation, London, 2007

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TEMPORARY SERVICES, TAMMS YEAR TEN AND SARAH ROSS

According to Solitary Watch, at least 80,000 prisoners are currently living in solitary confinement, of which 25,000 are under these conditions indefinitely. Prisoners remain in their private cells for 23-24 hours a day, without any contact with the outside world—no phone calls, community programs, work, or library access. Many studies have shown the detrimental psychological effects this environment imposes on individuals, yet 44 states now utilize it as a disciplinary tactic. In 2008, a group of collaborators gathered in Chicago to sign, address and mail letters to every prisoner in Illinois’ Tamms C-Max Supermax Prison, a long-term solitary facility that closed on January 1, 2013 thanks to the persistent activist Tamms Year Ten campaign. In their correspondence they asked the men if they wish to participate in Supermax Subscriptions, a program that exchanges frequent flier miles with magazine subscriptions for individuals in solitary confinement. At the start of the program, many of the Tamms men had been in solitary for over a decade, despite the state’s original intent to hold prisoners there for up to two years. Responses to the letters came in almost immediately —Tamms’ prisoners wrote with their subscription preferences and the organizers matched them up with mileage donors. In offering this service, this project exposed the inhumanity of maximum-security facilities, and enabled individuals to infiltrate these secluded confines to make a meaningful contribution to the lives of those often forgotten inside.

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Supermax Subscriptions 2008 – 2013Offset poster, magazines, letters, ticketsVariable dimensions

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BIOGRAPHIESYaelle Amir (Curator) is an independent curator and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing and curatorial projects focus primarily on artists whose practices supplement the initiatives of existing social movements—rendering themes within those struggles in ways that both interrogate and promote these issues to a wider audience. She has curated exhibitions at Artists Space, Center for Book Arts, ISE Cultural Foundation, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Marginal Utility, and the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, among others. She has also worked at major New York art institutions, such as the International Center of Photography, Rubin Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, and recently held a Research Scholar appointment at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. www.yaelleamir.com

Julie Green (Artist) was born in Japan in 1961. A Professor at Oregon State University, she lives in the Willamette Valley with her husband, the artist Clay Lohmann, and their small cat, Mini. Green spends winter months working on The Last Supper; to date, 600 final meals of U.S. inmates have been painted on ceramics. In summer, Green paints personal narratives on panel and on kiln-fired porcelain. Green has had twenty-eight solo exhibitions and recently received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and on National Public Radio. www.greenjulie.com

Ashley Hunt (Artist) uses image, object, word and performance-based strategies to engage the ideas of social movements, modes of learning, and the relationships between our art worlds and the larger worlds in which they sit. His work is often concerned with questions of power and the ways that some people have more, others have less, and what can be done about that. In addition to his Corrections Documentary Project, recent works include his ongoing collaboration with Taisha Paggett, On Movement, Thought and Politics; the performance, Notes on the Emptying of a City; the multi-platform Communograph at Project Row Houses; and the collaborative 9 Scripts from a Nation at War. Recent exhibitions and performances include Threewalls, the 2012 Biennial of the Hammer Museum, Sinopale 4 in Sinop, Turkey, and exhibitions and performances at the Museum of Modern Art, Beta Local in San Juan, and Woodbourne State Correctional Institute in upstate New York. www.correctionsproject.com

Lilly Lampe (Young Art Critic writer) is a writer and critic based in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum.com, Modern Painters, Paris Review Daily, and the Village Voice, among others. She holds a Masters in Humanities with a concentration in art history from the University of Chicago.

Lucky Pierre (Artists), founded in 1996, is a Chicago-based collaborative group working in writing, performance, and visual forms. Lucky Pierre creates structures for engagement with various publics. In these forms, they explore complex issues and ideas (political, aesthetic, social) in ways that accommodate a wide range of experience, styles and approaches. The open structure allows collaborators and viewers to define their own participation; helping to create the meaning, and determine the final form and outcome of the work. www.luckypierre.org

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Nancy Princenthal (Young Art Critic mentor) is a New York-based writer and former Senior Editor of Art in America; among other publications she has contributed to are Artforum, Art News, Parkett, the Village Voice, and The New York Times. Her monograph on Hannah Wilke was published by Prestel in 2010; she is currently writing a book about Agnes Martin.

The Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project (Artists), is an initiative that connects teaching artists and scholars to men at Stateville Prison, a maximum-security prison located 50 miles outside Chicago, IL. P+NAP organizes classes, workshops and guest lectures in the prison and in exhibitions and discussions around Chicago, with the goal of creating platforms for conversation about our prison nation, and collaborating with individuals most impacted by confinement. In 2013-2014 P+NAP started an artist-in-residence project with a focus on the idea of time. Outside artists Damon Locks, Fereshteh Toosi, Rob Shaw and Sarah Ross worked with inside artists Miguel Morales, James Piggues, George Frison, Alan White, Johnny Taylor, Carlos Santos, Joseph Dole, Devon Daniels, William Jones, Patrick Betley, Devon Terrell, Amhad Poole and Derrick Holman to create a body of work that attempts to articulate ideas of free time in an un-free place. www.p-nap.org

Sarah Ross (Artist) is an artist who works in sculpture, video and photo. Her projects use narrative and the body to address spatial concerns as they relate to access, class, anxiety and activism. Ross also works collaboratively with other artists on projects such as Compass (of the MRCC), Regional Relationships, Chicago Justice Torture Memorials, and in 2012 she co-founded the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project. She teaches at The School of the Art Institute Chicago and is the recipient of grants from the Propeller Fund, Graham Foundation, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, and the Illinois Art Council. Some of her work has been exhibited in venues such as the Armory, Pasadena, CA; Gallery 727, Los Angeles; PS122, New York; Roots and Culture Gallery, Chicago; Pinkard Gallery, Baltimore; META Cultural Foundation, Romania, and the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal.www.regionalrelationships.org | www.chicagotorture.org | www.p-nap.org

Dread Scott (Artist) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is exhibited across the U.S. and internationally. For almost three decades he has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine cohering norms of American society. In 1989, the entire U.S. Senate denounced his artwork and President Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its use of the American flag. His work has been exhibited and performed internationally including in MoMA/PS1, Pori Art Museum (Finland), BAM and galleries and street corners across the country. He is a recipient of a Creative Capital Grant and his work is included in the collection of the Whitney Museum. www.dreadscott.net

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Jackie Sumell (Artist) is a multidisciplinary artist, Soros Fellow, and activist inspired most by the lives of everyday people. Best known for her project The House That Herman Built (Herman’s House), her work speaks to both traditional artist communities and those historically marginalized from the political process. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe, and was featured in The New York Times, ArtForum, Newsweek, Mother Jones, Democracy Now, and Afterimage Journal. A documentary film about her project Herman's House premiered nationally on PBS in July 2013. She currently resides in New Orleans, Louisiana where she continues to work on Herman's House, and several other advocacy-based projects designed to interrupt the status quo and repair the collective imagination. www.hermanshouse.org

Tamms Year Ten (Artists) is a grassroots legislative campaign that set out to reform or close the Illinois state supermax, launched at the ten-year anniversary of its opening. Tamms Correctional Center, one of the most notorious prisons in the country, was designed for sensory deprivation and caused lasting mental damage to the men held in isolation there. The volunteer effort was a collaboration between men formerly incarcerated in Tamms, their family members, advocates, artists, and legislators. In 2009, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn made the courageous decision to reform Tamms. In 2013, in spite of tremendous opposition from the guards union and downstate legislators, the governor shuttered the prison outright. www.YearTen.org

Temporary Services (Artists) is Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer. They are based in Chicago, Copenhagen, and Philadelphia. They have existed, with several changes in membership and structure, since 1998. They produce exhibitions, events, projects, and publications. The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to them. www.temporaryservices.org

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CHECKLISTJULIE GREENThe Last Supper1999–PresentCobalt blue mineral paint on kiln-fired ceramic plates. Toni Acock, technical advisor Variable dimensions

ASHLEY HUNTCorrections2001 Single-channel video56 minutes

A Prison in the Fields2002 Single-channel video18 minutes

Attica: Roots of Resistance2001Single-channel video11 minutes

Lockdowns Up2002 Single-channel video9 Minutes

New Orleans Jazz Funeral2002Single-channel video18 minutes

Close Tallulah Now2003Single-channel video25 minutes

Organizing Critical Resistance South2003Single-channel video18 minutes

The Critical Resistance South Conference2004Single-channel video29 minutes

I Won’t Drown on that Levee and You Ain’t Gonna’ Break My Back2006Single-channel video30 minutes

Prison Maps: “The Prison Industrial Complex” and “What is the Context for Today’s Prison Industrial Complex?”2003Printed posters

From the series Degrees of Visibility:

2,152 men with a median age of 38.4 years old, Attica Correctional Facility, Attica, New York

3,168 men, 160% of the prison’s capacity, Salinas Valley State Prison, Soledad, California

1,100 people awaiting trial, Jefferson County Jail, a.k.a. Birmingham Jail, Birmingham, Alabama

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5,534 men in 5 adjacent prisons, set on former Shaker land and Underground Railroad stop, Enfield Correctional Institution, Northern Correcitonal Institution, Osborne Correctional Institution, Robinson Correctional Institution, and Willard-Cybulski Correctional Institution, Enfield, Connecticut

20144 C-Prints, framed33" x 17" each

LUCKY PIERREFinal Meals, 2002-PresentCommunity-based performance, event, and video installation

PRISON AND NEIGHBORHOOD ARTS PROJECT (P+NAP)Miguel Morales, James Piggues, George Frison, Alan White, Johnny Taylor, Carlos Santos, Joseph Dole, Devon Daniels, William Jones, Patrick Betley, Devon Terrell, Amhad Poole, Sarah Ross and Fereshteh ToosiExquisite Corps, 2014Four Posters12" x 18", editions of 125 each

Miguel Morales, James Piggues, Alan White, Johnny Taylor, Carlos Santos, Joseph Dole, Devon Daniels, William Jones, Patrick Betley, Devon Terrell, Amhad Poole, Derrick Holman, Rob Shaw and Damon LocksFreedom/Time, 2014Animation, 5’10”

Interviews with Devon Daniels, Johnny Taylor, Devon Terrell, Miguel Morales, James Piggues, William Jones, George Frison, 2014Audio

DREAD SCOTTLockdown2000-200411 Gelatin silver prints, spoken word audio 24" x 20" each

JACKIE SUMELLThe House that Herman Built (Herman's House)2003–PresentMixed media installationVariable dimensions

TEMPORARY SERVICES, TAMMS YEAR TEN AND SARAH ROSSSupermax Subscriptions, 2008–2013Offset poster, magazines, letters, ticketsVariable dimensions

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RESOURCESBan the BoxA campaign working to open up employment opportunities to individuals with past convictions.www.bantheboxcampaign.org

Books Through BarsA program that distributes books and educational materials to incarcerated individuals in the Mid-Atlantic region, prison libraries across the country, and halfway houses throughout the greater Philadelphia area.www.booksthroughbars.org

Bureau of Justice Statistics Collects, analyzes, publishes, and disseminates information on crime, criminal offenders, victims of crime, and the operation of justice systems at all levels of government.www.bjs.gov

California Coalition for Women PrisonersA grassroots organization that challenges the institutional violence imposed on women, transgender people, and communities of color by the prison industrial complex.www.womenprisoners.org

California Prison FocusAn effort that works to abolish the California prison system in its present condition, and investigates and exposes human rights abuses with the goal of ending long-term isolation, medical neglect, and all forms of discrimination. www.prisons.org

California Prison Moratorium ProjectAn organization seeking to stop all public and private prison construction in California, and advocating diverting public funds to pursue alternatives to imprisonment.www.calipmp.org

Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement A campaign working for sweeping reform of New York’s use of solitary confinement and other forms of extreme isolation in state prisons and local jails.www.nycaic.org

Center on Wrongful ConvictionsA legal clinic at Northwestern University that provides legal representation and research with the aim to free wrongfully convicted individuals. www.law.northwestern.edu/legalclinic/wrongfulconvictions

Correctional AssociationA nonprofit organization granted authority by NY State to inspect prisons and report its findings and recommendations to the public, with a goal to educate and advocate for a humane and effective criminal justice system.www.correctionalassociation.org

Critical ResistanceA national, member-based grassroots organization that works to build a mass movement to dismantle the prison industrial complex.www.criticalresistance.org

This is a list of select resources for readers who wish to learn about additional activist initiatives and organizations working to raise awareness and alleviate the effects of mass incarceration.

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Education Justice ProjectAn academic community committed to expanding higher education within American prisons as a matter of justice. www.educationjustice.net

Equal Justice USA A national, grassroots organization working to build a criminal justice system that is fair, effective, and responsive to everyone impacted by crime.www.ejusa.org

Holler to the HoodA multi-media human rights project designed to foster collaboration and communication between urban and rural communities. The project was initiated by Appalshop artists in response to the growing prison boom in the economically distressed central Appalachian coalfields.www.appalshop.org/h2h/about.htm

Incarcerated Nation CampaignA movement working to combat the inhumane and counterproductive treatment of people during and after their time incarcerated, and promote more conscious and effective ways to address the incarceration and re-entry of our citizens.www.incarceratednationcampaign.org

The Innocence ProjectA national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing, and to reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.www.innocenceproject.org

International Coalition to Free the Angola 3A campaign seeking the immediate release of Albert Woodfox, an innocent man and the sole member of the Angola 3 still in solitary confinement more than 41 years after his wrongful conviction.www.angola3.org

Justice Mapping CenterA program specializing in the use of computer mapping (GIS) to help better understand, evaluate, and communicate criminal justice and other social policy information.www.justicemapping.org

Justice NowA law clinic that partners with people in women's prisons and local communities to build a safe, compassionate world without prisons.www.jnow.org

Legal Services for Prisoners with ChildrenLSPC organizes communities impacted by the criminal justice system and advocates to release incarcerated people, to restore human and civil rights, and to reunify families and communities. www.prisonerswithchildren.org

Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation A community led by family members of murder victims and the executed that advocates for the repeal of the death penalty.www.mvfr.org

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National ACLU: Prisoners Rights A project dedicated to ensuring that our nation’s places of detention comply with the Constitution, domestic law, and international human rights principles, and to ending the policies that have given the U.S. the highest incarceration rate in the world.www.aclu.org/prisoners-rights

National Religious Campaign Against Torture An organization that mobilizes people of faith to end torture in U.S. policy, practice, and culture.www.nrcat.org

NYCLU Boxed In A project aimed at raising public awareness to the use and consequences of extreme isolation in New York, and pushing for system-wide reform.www.boxedinny.org

Open Society Foundations The OSF supports global criminal justice reform by developing alternatives to pretrial detention, broadening access to competent legal representation, and promoting new alliances for reform.www.opensocietyfoundations.org/topics/criminal-justice

Pelican Bay Hunger Strike SolidarityA coalition committed to amplifying the voices of and supporting the prisoners at Pelican Bay and other CA prisons while on hunger strike to protest the continued use of solitary confinement.http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com

PEN American Center’s Prison Writing ProgramA program that guides, publishes, and promotes writing authored by incarcerated individuals.www.pen.org/prison-writing

Prison Activist Resource CenterA prison abolitionist group committed to exposing and challenging the institutionalized racism, sexism, able-ism, heterosexism, and classism of the prison industrial complex.www.prisonactivist.org

The Prison Arts CoalitionAn independent platform providing information and resources for people creating art in and around the American prison system.www.theprisonartscoalition.com

Prison PhotographyA website featuring photography projects in sites of incarceration around the world.www.prisonphotography.org

Prison Policy InitiativeAn organization that produces cutting edge research to expose the broader harm of mass criminalization, and then sparks advocacy campaigns to create a more just society.www.prisonpolicy.org

Project NIA A grassroots effort to dramatically reduce the reliance on arrest, detention and incarceration for addressing youth crime and to instead promote the use of restorative and transformative practices.www.project-nia.org

Race ForwardAn organization with the mission to build awareness, solutions and leadership for racial justice by generating transformative ideas, information, and experiences.www.raceforward.org

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The Real Cost of PrisonsA national organization working to broaden and deepen the organizing capacity of prison/justice activists and people directly experiencing the impact of mass incarceration.www.realcostofprisons.org

Restorative Justice OnlineA non-partisan resource on restorative justice – a theory of justice that emphasizes repairing the harm caused or revealed by criminal behavior through cooperative processes that include all stakeholders.www.restorativejustice.org

Resurrection After Exoneration An organization dedicated to the rehabilitation of exonerees after incarceration by assisting them during their transition process to ensure a successful reentry, and by empowering them to confront and reform the system that victimized them.www.r-a-e.org/home

The Sentencing ProjectA leading organization working for a fair and effective U.S. criminal justice system by promoting reforms in sentencing policy, addressing unjust racial disparities and practices, and advocating for alternatives to incarceration.www.sentencingproject.org

Solitary WatchA web-based project aimed at bringing the widespread use of solitary confinement out of the shadows and into the light by providing vital information and reporting.www.solitarywatch.com

Tamms Year TenA coalition that came together to protest the misguided and inhumane policies at Tamms supermax, and end the use of long-term isolation in Illinois.www.yearten.org

Victim Offender Mediation Association An organization that provides resources, training, and technical assistance in victim-offender mediation, conferencing, circles, and related restorative justice practices. www.voma.org

Voice of the Ex-Offender (V.O.T.E)A grassroots, membership based organization that builds the political and economic power of people most critically impacted by the criminal justice system, especially formerly incarcerated persons (FIPs), their families and loved ones. www.vote-nola.org

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTSJulie Green is grateful to Clay Lohmann for looking at every plate and for knowing about cuts of meat, to Toni Acock for firing each plate, and to Oregon State University and the Joan Mitchell Foundation for their generous support.

Ashley Hunt thanks Nils Christie, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Rachel Herzing, and Taisha Paggett.

Lucky Pierre would like to thank members past and present who have contributed to the Final Meals project: Holly Abney, Karen Christopher, Travis Hale, Kerry Hayes, Kevin Kaempf, Jeff Kowalkowski, Heather Lindahl, Tyler Myers, Matthew Nicholas, Bill Talsma, Michael Thomas, Mary Zerkel.

The P+NAP collaborators would like to thank Heather Radke and the Jane Addams Hull House Museum, Damon Locks for working with the incarcerated artists, and Rob Shaw for animating the drawings.

Jackie Sumell would like to thank Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, Robert King and all persons who possess the extraordinary spirit necessary to survive the impossible.

Tamms Year Ten would like to thank Governor Pat Quinn and Illinois Department of Corrections Director Salvador A. Godinez for closing Tamms supermax prison on January 4, 2013. They urge all to support Governor Quinn in his 2014 re-election any way you can.

Yaelle Amir is grateful for the tremendous efforts of the CUE Art Foundation staff, particularly Jessica Gildea, Shona Masarin-Hurst, and Beatrice Wolert-Weese; Ashley Hunt and Lilly Lampe for contributing incredibly thoughtful and gracious catalogue essays; Hazel, Shaul, Annie, Meg, and Mike for their continuing feedback and support throughout the making of this exhibition; and above all the participating artists who made this exhibition possible with works that reflect their courage and steadfast belief that another judicial system is necessary and possible.

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MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY: CAF AMERICAN DONOR FUND THE VIKING FOUNDATION ANHOLT SERVICES (USA) INC. AGNES GUND THE JOAN MITCHELL FOUNDATION NEW YORK COMMUNITY TRUST THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE CITY COUNCIL NEW YORK STATE COUNCIL ON THE ARTS WITH THE SUPPORT OF GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO AND THE NEW YORK STATE LEGISLATURE

CUE Art Foundation’s operations and programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, corporations, government agencies, individuals, and its members.

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