From juvenile offenders to greying lifers, fifteen photographers offer a human glimpse of the world’s largest prison system—and the millions of Americans trapped in its wide-ranging web.
Starting around 1980, the United States exponentially expanded its prison system, now the largest in the world by a long shot. This country has put a name to the phenomenon that now has one in every 36 people under some sort of correctional control. We call it “mass incarceration.” But what does the result of four decades of mass incarceration look like?
State officials celebrate the opening of new prison in Ohio, 2001. (Andrew Lichtenstein @andrewlichtenstein)
We launched @EverydayIncarceration on Instagram in late 2014 to explore that question. The story of incarceration is often told through one lens at a time — that of the state, or advocates, or a single photographer. But to understand what having millions of people behind bars every day means for society, we need to look through more than one set of eyes. That’s why our feed is collaborative, bringing together archival photos of established photographers, current images of emerging photographers, work of conceptual artists and illustrators, and students at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
This edit of images we’ve featured moves from life inside of prisons to the world outside, showing the way the effects of incarceration ripple through families and communities. Each photograph is one of a set, which can be explored at greater length by visiting @EverydayIncarceration on mobile or the web. All images are contributed by individual photographers, who spent months, years or sometimes decades working on these stories.
Correctional officers gather for roll call at what was then called the Adolescent Recession Detention Center (ARDC), which held 14-to 21 -year-olds on Rikers Island. When Lorenzo Steele became an officer in the late 1980s, he spent two to three months in the academy before being assigned to ARDC. “They could never prepare you mentally and physically for what you were about to experience,” Steele told Pete Brook. Steele spent 12 years as a New York City corrections officer. “One of the blessings was that I always had good supervisors,” he said. “When the captain said ‘go’, you went, and when he said ‘stop’, you stopped. You put your life in the hands of your captain; it’s almost like being in a war.” (Lorenzo Steele Jr.)
Chris Gage, an inmate at Angola Penitentiary, is a three-time winner of the “Guts and Glory” event, in which prisoners try to grab a red poker chip tied to the forehead of what the emcee calls “the toughest Brahma bull available.” With 75% of inmates at Angola serving life sentences, the rodeo presents a unique opportunity to socialize with family and friends who manage to get a ticket to the event. The fact that the actual rodeo can be extremely dangerous also holds a darkly ironic appeal – if they are seriously injured, inmates are removed from work duty to recover in the prison’s medical ward. (William Widmer, @misterwidmer)
Vinny eats his first meal in the cafeteria of the juvenile detention center. “Vinny and David” is a long-term project that begins with Vinny, then 13, when he was incarcerated for stabbing his mother’s assailant, and shadows him and his older brother, David, who cycles in and out of jail; the ongoing photo essay focuses on the brothers’ lives in their family and community over three years in New Mexico. (Isadora Kosofsky)
“This was made on the first day of my first extensive visit to this prison. This unusually old convict was playing with this kitten near a vent from the prison laundry the source of all the steam on a cold November day.” West Virginia Penitentiary, Moundsville, West Virginia, 1977-78. (Sean Kernan)
A member of Estrella Jail’s chain gang breaks down during burial duty at White Tanks Cemetery outside Phoenix, Arizona on December 19, 2003. The jail is home to America’s first and only female chain gang. (Scott Houston)
A prisoner photographed through a cell slot at the Metro Correctional Institution near Atlanta, Georgia, in 1993. (Marilyn Suriani)
Hospice volunteer Randolph Matthieu, far right, shows Paul Krolowitz, Carlo DeSalvo and Joseph Greco how to massage their friend Richard Liggett. Liggett is a hospice patient diagnosed with lung and liver cancers. Liggett is a carpenter at Angola prison and trained Krolowitz, DeSalvo and Greco in the carpentry shop. In addition to caring for patients, hospice also helps the loved ones they leave behind. (Lori Waselchuk, @fototornado)
Since 2012, artist Mark Strandquist and those he works with have written to prisoners across the country asking them, “If you had a window in your cell, what place from your past would it look out to?” They then take photographs of the scenes the prisoners describe. Dear Reader and Spectator: As I stare out my window through the bars I can see The Dam. A beautiful waterfall in the middle of Pocahontas State Park surrounded by never ending rows of trees that resemble multicolor buds sprouting high into the clouds. Where wildlife romes with no boundaries. Gods creation so pure.” (Mark Strandquist @markstrandquist)
A girl and her mother rest on the long ride back to New York City after visiting a loved one imprisoned upstate. A bus ride costs $65 per adult and $30 per child, a substantial sum for families, many of whom struggle to make ends meet and are effectively single-parent households. (Jacobia Dahm, @jacobiadahm)
Wendy, 13, and Sheila, 14, were placed on probation for assaulting a student during a basketball practice who had shoved Wendy earlier that day. Sheila told me, “Defending yourself or your family is different than fighting just to fight. I don’t care who it is, if they’re messing with my family, then they are messing with me.” (Zora Murff, @zorajmurff)
First Meal Out: A large Meat Lover’s Pan Pizza and a Naked Mighty Mango juice
About 23,544 people were released from New York State prisons last year. While some are met by families, many must make their own way home. Prisoners are given $40 of “gate money,” plus any funds left in their personal accounts. According to the state, they are also provided transportation to the county where they were convicted, and “civilian” clothing if they do not have any of their own.During the 21 years Seth Ferranti, 43, spent in prison, he avoided the meal hall. Instead he took cooking tips from other prisoners, who taught him how to make spaghetti in a hot pot. “I went to prison, basically, to learn how to cook from mobsters,” he said.Ferranti ate his first meal after his release in August in the car on the way to the halfway house: a large Meat Lover’s pie from Pizza Hut. “I ate it cold,” he said. One of the biggest things for him is being able to choose what to eat. Now that he’s out, he cooks more than ever. (Julius Motal, @juliasmotalphoto)
As an orthodox Jew, Joseph Goldstein was in the minority in prison, but in other ways he resembles others behind bars. Most New York State prisoners are men, and the average age is 37. About a quarter of prisoners are white. “Men don’t cry? On the contrary. You need an emotional release somehow – and prison doesn’t allow that,” he says. “Emotionally, I’m still scarred; I’ll never recover – I still have sleepless, excruciating nights. It changed me in a way where I think twice before doing something.” In prison, Goldstein directed much of his time and energy on writing, reading and improving his language skills. He even wrote a 385-page novel using a prison typewriter. “My experience is that language changes your behavior,” he says. “If I use nasty language, it either makes me feel like a victim of something nasty or that I’m inflicting it on someone.” (Jake Becker, @jbeckerny)
Stacey Hamilton says 18 years in prison, including four years in solitary confinement, stripped her of self-respect, dignity and pride. “For the first time, I felt like I was a slave, because that’s how they treated us.” Turning to the student Bible her daughter had given her, Hamilton rediscovered her Catholic faith and reached out to God. “That’s what carried me,” she says. (Allegra Abramo, @allegraabramo)
All the men condemned to death in California live at San Quentin prison. California has 745 people on death row, more than any other state but has not carried out an execution since 2006, when issues with the legal injection process led to a de facto moratorium on the death penalty. (Stephen Tourlentes (top) and prison map (bottom) by Josh Begley, @joshbegley)
Send us a story tip
