NCJ Number
180576
Date Published
1999
Length
150 pages
Annotation
This volume presents five essays that critically examine criminal justice policies and uses photographs and the words of inmates and others to provide a documentary report on prison conditions, with emphasis on the physical and psychological environments of a range of contemporary correctional institutions and inmates.
Abstract
The foreword by Angela Davis and essays by Michael Jacobson-Hardy, John Edgar Wideman, Marc Mauer, and James Gilligan, M.D., critique the criminal justice system and offer a framework for understanding the photographs in their historical and cultural context. The photographs focus on inmates, cells, bars, corridors, gates, doors, work settings, exercise yards, gun towers, cyclone fences, and layers of razor wire. The foreword notes the contrast between the self-possession that characterizes many prisoners and the social dispossession and invisibility they experience individually and collectively as wards of the correctional system. It comments that the psychological impact of razor wire is as powerful as its potential physical impact and asks readers to examine the circumstances that lead individuals to prison and to consider becoming involved with an organization that focuses on prisoners' rights. The other papers argue that awareness of what happens behind prison walls is a crucial first step in preventing the worst abuses of corrections and realigning it with enlightened notions of justice, rehabilitation, and punishment; explain the history of prisons; and examine violence causes and the role of correctional reform in preventing violence. Photographs