Ten-year-old Christian, acused of family violence, sits alone in his cell. It sounds harmless: “pre-trial detention.” But the reality is far different. In a squat block building in Laredo, Texas and in similar places around the nation children await trial or placement in concrete cells while the underlying issues that led to their behavior fester. Some are addicts who need treatment; others are kids battling mental illnesses. Many are angry and have been virtually abandoned by absentee or irresponsible parents. Some spend a few days, others months, but despite the efforts of a small corps of dedicated professionals, few actually receive treatment for the issues that brought them to juvenile hall. Photo: Steve Liss.

Last Autumn, I popped my head in at The New Yorker offices. If you can get yourself to the 20th floor of the Conde Nast Building I recommend it; lovely folk and The New Yorker’s photobook library is a treat.

When TNY staffers Whitney Johnson and James Pomerantz asked if I could recommend any prison photographers, I thought, ‘Yeah, how long have you got?’ Turns out, they already had the feelers out; they just wanted to check they had not overlooked anyone.

In the end they plumped for Steve Liss’ image of an incarcerated youth (above). In negotiating the image use, Steve was given – in a separate Photobooth blog post – a platform to talk about the collective American Poverty he founded. Fair trade.

Steve Liss at his desk at Columbia College, Chicago with an image from No Place For Children to his back. Photo: Pete Brook

To be honest, back in November, I was just pleased to hear The New Yorker was doing a feature piece on American prisons. 10 weeks down the line, we now know that that feature is Adam Gopnik’s The Caging of America.

Gopnik delivers a scathing – but eloquent – telling of the story of mass incarceration in the U.S. He opens, as he should, with the shocking facts:

“There are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”

and,

“In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.”

and,

“Every day, at least fifty thousand men wake in solitary confinement [...] where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)”

and,

“Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncooperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic.”

But where most of us might sit tight on feelings of anger or helplessness, Gopnik tries to find out why America cages people at six times the rate of other developed nations.

Gopnik leans heavily on the hypotheses of two formidable thinkers.

First, on the late William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who argued in his book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice and that the Bill of Rights favours procedure over principles.

Second, Gopnik summarises the work of Berkeley Law criminologist Franklin E. Zimring. His new book The City That Became Safe tries to fathom the dramatic drop in crime in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. “One thing Zimring teaches us,” says Gopnik, “is how little we know.”

In the first case, common sense does not prevail. If a trial is deemed to have been conducted correctly, then factors such as inadequacy of council, prosecutorial misconduct to the disadvantage a defendant may not be of importance; the legal procedure has been carried forth. It takes a lot to win a retrial. On the other hand, a defendant who is clearly guilty, may be set free due to a minor legal technicality.

In the second case, common sense – or more precisely compassion and dexterity of process – it is argued is all we might have left. Zimring shows us that New York’s 40% drop in crime, “didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished.”

Instead it came partly from attentive policing in high-crime areas:

“As Zimring puts it, that a ‘light’ program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.”

This is an uncomfortable thesis for liberals and civil rights lawyers, but Zimring isn’t in the business of placating political groups and Gopnik is not in the business of avoiding difficult propositions.

The long and short of it is that the legal system is too rigid to adapt and that cultural ideas shift far quicker than legislators will, or are able to, respond to. Gopnik also suggests that too much of law-making is attached to partisan politickers unwilling to entertain approaches that don’t fit their staked ideology, even when actually work. In that way Gopnik echoes the arguments of beat cops and community workers who from first hand experience can tell you what is effective and what is not.

Gopnik amplifies Zimring’s conclusion that prisons have had very little effect in reducing crime. A multitude of other factors achieved that. Gopnik notes that 1 in every 100,000 men will commit a very serious violent act and these individuals should be locked away. You’ll get few arguments from prison reformers on that. But what of the other 730? (The U.S. incarcerates 731 per 100,000 people).

Surely then, it is incumbent on us as a society to demand non-custodial sentences for non-violent crimes. Clearly the drug war has failed, and drug users need treatment not imprisonment.

If there is one weakness in Gopnik’s article it is that he repeats too often his example that decriminalising marijuana would be a step in the right direction. Of course, it would and so would his other suggestions of “ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors and leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)” but we’re given no indication of how much of an effect the decriminalization of marijuana would have on reducing the prison population.

GOPNIK’S ARTICLE ARRIVES AT THE RIGHT TIME

These are enlightened times.

This week, dozens of people have emailed me to say that they’ve been affected by Gopnik’s article.

One prominent photoblogger wrote:

What’s interesting is that the article really illuminated the issue for me with several “ah-ha” type moments. Why is that photography doesn’t or can’t do that? I mean, I’ve been following Prison Photography for a couple years now and haven’t really had one of those “ah-ha” moments. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention? Or maybe I’m NOT looking for those “ah-ha” moments from photography.  It all fits together though. I mean, now that I’ve read the Gopnik article, I view your work with Prison Photography much differently.

One prominent photographer wrote:

The whole business of  emphasis on process over principles, I can’t tell you how often when I was doing the documenting the public defender and the courts that I thought this isn’t about justice this about slavery to the law. But what I really meant was that it was slavery to process. I ran into even more glaringly with a story on a death row prisoner in Missouri. The Missouri Attorney General actually said it didn’t matter that he was probably (actually he was more than probably) innocent, he had gotten a full and fair trial and they were going to kill him.

So there are two very important things for me to take away.

One – that I must always be crystal clear not only about what I write, but why I write. There are so many problems (death penalty, juvenile incarceration, aging prisoners, inadequate healthcare, poor representation for the indigent, separation of families, control of media, physical and psychological abuse, private prisons, immigration policy and detention, absent education and rehabilitation) with the criminal justice and the prison systems that each needs its space … and people need time to digest the issues and synthesise the information.

Two – the burden on me to talk about these complex issues in a clear way is made only more important because I think we’re experiencing something of a zeitgeist moment. More and more in mainstream media, the prison system is being discussed and challenged; practices that were considered standard are being looked at again; politicians from across the spectrum are happy to be “sensible on crime” instead of “tough on crime” (they may not share the same solutions but they’re agreeing that the system is broken.

I really do feel we’ve past a tipping point and that the American people are aware now how their communities have been wrecked and that their money has been wasted.

The failed policies that created mass incarceration need to be scrapped and more humane solutions sought. For opponents, America’s archipelago of prisons has always been a moral issue, but now we see everyday Americans and their politicians speaking of it in the same terms. I’m hopeful we’ve begun to turn the corner.

I feel I’ve tried and fallen short in elucidating the core of the matter as regards solitary confinement. When I watched The Gray Box, by freelance journalist Susan Greene and DAX Films, I knew it was something I had to share.

The Gray Box speaks as I never could; it has voices of experience. You’ll be awed by the psychological terror they describe and by the activities isolated prisoners employ to remain sane.

Of all the many battles at hand for prison reformers, it is felt that the campaign against the over-use of solitary confinement in American prisons is an issue that currently resonates enough with the public to effect some policy change.

The anti-Solitary bloc has simplified its message saying that solitary confinement does permanent damage to the mind of he or she imprisoned; a view backed up by medical science.

Publics are also more educated about isolation – and the manipulation/interrogation techniques associated with it – because Guantanamo prison has been regularly discussed in the media for over a decade.

Essentially, the knowledge that solitary destroys people is knowledge that anyone on the political spectrum can understand and oppose. From the hardcore secular ACLU to coalitions of churches, the voices in opposition to solitary confinement are wide and varied. Even so, we do still see some prisons such as Rikers Island which are bucking the trend and pushing for the to use of more solitary confinement.

Furthermore, the few actions of what we might refer to as prisoner resistance include calls to curtail the use of solitary confinement. (This is something Isaac Ontiveros covered when we discussed the California hunger strike).

Solitary confinement is not an issue I feel I’ve adequately discussed here on the blog. I’ve brought up it’s historical genesis; I’ve discussed isolation in and out of prisons; and I’ve referred you to stories about infamous U.S. prisoners such as Robert King and Leonard Peltier who served and are serving time in isolation.

Truly, if you want to know about the abusive use of solitary confinement in US prison’s follow James Ridgeway’s vital journalism at Solitary Watch.

Ridgeway, a voice you can rely on, says about the film and of Greene’s article The Gray Box: An Investigative Look at Solitary Confinement:

This is one of the most comprehensive articles ever written about solitary confinement in the United States, and is particularly noteworthy for including the voices of prisoners, obtained through correspondence with those buried in isolation. It is also passionate and personal.

JOURNALISTS

Susan Greene is a former-columnist at the Denver Post who often wrote about the widespread use of solitary in Colorado’s prisons and at the federal supermax, ADX Florence.

James Ridgeway was interviewed by the Dart Center and talked about the murky statistics and exchange of (mis)information about American prisoners in solitary.

Joseph Rodriguez alerted me to this film. Joseph’s own work Re-Entry in Los Angeles appears among the Spring 2012 Dart Society Reports.

The Dart Society Reports distributes journalism about trauma, violence and human rights.

Black Book of Aggressors I 17 THE HEAVY CABLE WIRE. Selma Waldman. Black Book of Aggressors 2005 – 2007, charcoal, pastel, on black paper, 8 1/2 x 11″

“The perpetration of violence takes away an individual’s humanity, abuser and victim are locked in one energy field, that is like sex, they join together with energy, but in [Waldman's] energy field, they are killing and being killed.”

– Susan Noyes Platt (Source)

Selma Waldman (1932-2008) is one of the great American artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Unfortunately for the American public, her work has been more widely exhibited in other parts of the world, particularly in Germany.

Just as I insisted when I wrote about Daniel Heyman’s Portraits of Iraqis, it’s often worthwhile to look non-photographic work. As with Heyman’s work, I was introduced to Waldman’s work through Susan Noyes Platt’s vital book Art and Politics Now.

During Waldman’s lifetime, Noyes Platt was a vocal cheerleader for her work. Following Waldman’s death, Noyes Platt reconstructed her studio in a Seattle gallery space.

One of her final projects, Waldman’s Black Book of Aggressors explores her life long exploration of personal abuse between humans set in the milieu of widespread terror. The work is clearly to be understood within the context of the Abu Ghraib images but Waldman’s use of pastel extends the horror and successfully creates something significantly different and more nuanced. (I point people towards Antonin Kratochvil’s Homage to Abu Ghraib as an example of how photography can fail in it’s response to atrocity.)

Waldman conjures violent sexual depravity that represents any torture scenario, but because of global events, we know she is passing commentary on the U.S. military. It is difficult work … even for the art establishment.

Of Black Book of Aggressors Noyes Platt says:

“No museum will touch her potent work that exposes the intersection of sex, war, and torture. Her most recent series is on black paper with chalk lines in blue, red, yellow. It is a tangle of passionate fury that ensnarls interrogators and victims in a process that has no moral parameters. She declares in the brochure “War is the Crime, Naked/Aggression is the work”

In as much as the artistic process can mimic the mayhem of torture, I think Waldman succeeds and viewers are mired in what she described as “the pornography of power”.

I don’t repeat the phrase “the pornography of power” lightly. Particularly in photography circles there have been recent re-examinations of what it actually means to describe an image as pornographic. See David Campbell’s excellent essay The Problem with Regarding Photography of Suffering as ‘Pornographic’ as an introduction to the topic.

But with Waldman’s work we’re dealing with pastels and not photos.

One of the challenges to the lazy use of the term ‘pornography’ is that it is often applied specifically to photography, and as such infers something innately violating about photography. Susan Sontag is the often quoted name when people want to discuss photography and violation.

To determine what Waldman achieved with her work and also what we experience as viewers, it is worth considering Campbell’s summary of the term ‘pornographic’:

As a signifier of responses to bodily suffering, ‘pornography’ has come to mean the violation of dignity, cultural degradation, taking things out of context, exploitation, objectification, putting misery and horror on display, the encouragement of voyeurism, the construction of desire, unacceptable sexuality, moral and political perversion, and a fair number more.

Most of these are present in Waldman’s work and yet because she has created a scene and expressed it in pastel, the artworks are essentially invitations to join the artist in protest.

We know that Waldman was not present as the torture and perversions occurred. With photography, on the other hand, we cannot escape the fact that along with the camera there is (usually) the camera operator.

Photography “places us” in the violent space of the original act, whereas painting often puts us in the artist’s imagination. When we engage with a photograph and substitute the camera operator with ourselves, we are repulsed. Often we’ll look away and often we ask, how could they take such a photograph?

Painted art is rarely in the position to be so closely associated with the violence of the act it depicts. When we note Waldman’s violent brushstrokes we celebrate them as conceptually consistent. When we note that a button on a camera was pushed, we may think, “Why didn’t the photographer intervene.” The answers are many and the interventions not as easy as we might hope.

Under the Websters entry for ‘pornography’ the third of three definitions reads:

The depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction, i.e. the pornography of violence.

So, the issue is not that depictions of violence shouldn’t be referred to as pornographic, the issue is that too often images – and particularly photographs – of violence are referred to wrongly as pornographic.

Perhaps the most licentious element of pornographic photos is that of voyeurism. As much as people who consider photography like to discuss the contradictions and layers of meaning within photography, it seems to me, in this comparative case at least, that Waldman’s simpler direct pastel-works are a more substantive experience for the audience. They cannot be dismissed as cheap voyeurism.

Think about it. If we are shown photographs of violence then we must automatically denounce the violence. Simultaneously, the presumption is we are also repulsed. Yes, we can be made to look away, but does that mean we never look back?

A photograph holds within it a never-ending capacity for voyeurism. It is a literal depiction and (I might get in trouble for saying this) it is closer to representational truth than any painting is.

Waldman’s pastels truly are the pornography of power; it is an appropriate phrase for her work. It’s a pornography we can look at and possibly learn from. Waldman depicts the perversions of imperial power without implicating our perversions. Her artwork severs the view of the aggressor from our own view.

In Black Book of Aggressors, you don’t find the voyeuristic tension that exists in photography. It’s powerful, relevant and persistent art.

Black Book of Aggressors, NAKED/AGGRESSION. Selma Waldman. Black Book of Aggressors 2005 – 2007, charcoal, pastel, on black paper, 8 1/2 x 11″

Black Book of Aggressors I. CHAINS OF COMMAND. Selma Waldman Black Book of Aggressors 2005 – 2007, charcoal, pastel, on black paper, 8 1/2 x 11″

Black Book of Aggressors IV 35 WATERBOARDING. Selma Waldman Black Book of Aggressors 2005 – 2007, charcoal, pastel, on black paper, 8 1/2 x 11″

Black Book of aggresors IV WATERBOARDING. Selma Waldman Black Book of Aggressors 2005 – 2007, charcoal, pastel, on black paper, 8 1/2 x 11″

Selma Waldman. Black Book of Aggressors 2005 – 2007, charcoal, pastel, on black paper, 8 1/2 x 11″

Black Book of Aggressors IV 39 WATERBOARDING PROFESSIONAL. Selma Waldman. Black Book of Aggressors 2005 – 2007, charcoal, pastel, on black paper, 8 1/2 x 11″

GITMO JACK, NAKED AGGRESSION. Selma Waldman. Black Book of Aggressors 2005 – 2007, charcoal, pastel, on black paper, 8 1/2 x 11″