Incarceration in America @shacklesusa-blog - Tumblr Blog

I consider Sye Williams’s work as the antithesis of stereotype portrayal of prisoners. The portraits above not only project prisons as ordinary people if they are taken out of the context of the correctional facilities, but also give them power of seeing. They are not passive object to be looked at. Instead they are looking directly back at the viewer. An intimate eye contact abridged the distance between the prisoners and the society at large. The lower image exposed the misfortune and roughness of life of people living on the fringes of society, meanwhile, represented her with dignity and individuality.

Source from https://prisonphotography.org/2011/10/30/ppotr-dispatch-7-interview-with-sye-williams/

Central Park Five is a documentary on the famous Central Park Jogger Case. In the beginning of the documentary, it revealed the innocence of the five convicted teenagers by providing the confession of the real attacker of the female jogger. It started off with interviews of the five teenagers from a sympathetic and humanitarian lens. The documentary was told by various narrations from the five teenagers and their families to the journalists and legal professionals.

In the eighties, New York has the cultural and political climate of high crime rates and unstable neighborhoods. It talked about how the media has played a large part in fueling this case with the cultural bias of the time. Later in the film, the five teenagers confided in how they were manipulated to eventually confess a made-up story and how the legal systems have enabled it.

The documentary placed the five convicted teenager as the victims of this case and the justice system the unconvicted criminal. Each teenager has served about seven years of the crimes that they did not commit and even till today the prosecutor did not admit the wrongful prosecution.

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/centralparkfive/

Richard Ross’s this piece was paired with a 15 year old narrative about her story. The piece not only has the charm of a peculiar fine art portrait but also the humanitarian lens to find beauty and innocence in all human beings defying the stereotype of criminals as subhuman and unworthy.

Source: http://richardross.net/juvenile-in-justice

Photos from Richard Ross’s Juvenile in Justice.

The individuals in the images are not only powerless but also hopeless about the physical confinement and the unwilling deprivation of freedom. Essentially these are children in solitary confinement. What’s the difference of a child’s experience of solitary confinement to child neglect/child abuse?

Holding Cells, Joint Task Force | Guantanamo, Cuba 2006

From Richard Ross’s Architecture of Authority which is a project ranking the building spaces from the lowest dimension to the highest(from prison to military headquarter). Again the motif or the philosophy of Eastern State Penitentiary’s long corridor.

Source:http://richardross.net/architecture-of-authority-c8ac7

Eastern State Penitentiary

The iconic image of long abysmal hallway and solitary confinement are cliche that people think of when it comes to prisons.

Eastern State Penitentiary was a revolutionary system of separate incarceration it's a first-of-its-kind and it emphasizes on reform than punishment is also dub Pennsylvania system. It's radio for plan and a system of solitary confinement was modeled for over 300 prisons worldwide. The warden was legally required to visit every made every day and the overseers sees the inmates three times a day as a form of rehabilitation.

Each cell was led only by a single date sores from either skylights or the windows and it's considered “window of God” or “eyes of God” and the church viewed imprisonment especially in isolation as an instrument that would modify sinful or disruptive behavior and time spent in prison cells can help you maids to reflect on their crimes committed give them the mission redemption. Similarly the center tower is designed to most efficiently keep prisoners under constant surveillance.

Source from:http://io9.gizmodo.com/here-are-some-of-the-creepiest-abandoned-prisons-weve-1495384465

and http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/eastern-state-penitentiary-a-prison-with-a-past-14274660/

Protestors gather in front of the White House to demand the closing of Guantanamo Bay in April, 2013. (Photo: Reuters)

The words held by the protesters made the context of the prisoners and issues related more concrete. From the orange uniform the viewers can tell that the issue is related to prisoners. Perhaps the sacks that cover the heads of the prisoners remind the audience of the iconic image of Abu Ghraib torture and how abuse strips a person's identity. The anonymous nature of this image has to be supplemented by the caption or descriptive information. The image poses questions and the texts answer them.

Stanford prison experiment was lead by a psychology professor, funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and conducted in in Stanford university by 24 students aiming to investigate the perceived power and the struggle between prisoners and guards. The experiment was abandoned after 6 days during it’s planned 14-day period.

Interestingly, the participants internalized roles and was reluctant to stop the experiment. The experiment's results favor situational attribution of behavior over dispositional attribution meaning the behavior of the participants are largely situational instead of being determined by their personalities. The conclusion and observation is likely subjective and anecdotal by objections.

This experiment was documented and later on produced as a documentary Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment (1992), a 2015 film The Stanford Prison Experiment was also based on this experiment.

The documentary short premieres today at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin.

#sxsw

The way we treat prisoners in the US has never made any sense to me. This country is easily the world’s leader in the total number of prisoners and in the per capita number. The US prison sys…

“The US system is the end product of a scared population, a political class that panders to the worst fears of the public, a vindictive and retributive mindset that places a greater value on satisfying the desire for vengeance on the part of victims, their families, and the larger society rather than on preventing future victims.”

Brief Video: Prison system US vs Norway

In our continuing series focusing on the prison system in America, we bring you a list of the 10 most notorious jails in the country. Many of these prisons on the list are familiar by name to many …

Top 10 Most Notorious Prisons In The U.S. and they exist.

#prison

An Introduction to Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish- A Macat Sociology Analysis

#foucault #prison

Niyi Awofeso, PhD University of Western Australia, Perth “First we shape our buildings; then they shape us” Winston Churchill, 1943 Architectural plans for NewGate Prison, London, c. 1800 (left) andChurch of St. Roch, Lisbon, c. 1578 (right) Creating

An article with lots of references at the end note on the architecture of prison from a perspective of modern medicine

In solitary confinement, the failures of the justice system pile up on each other. This is what happens when they land on society's most vulnerable.

A great article on solitary confinement with stylized web design and Illustration

#solitaryconfinement #prison

Panopticon and Panopticism

#prison

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