The Artists Taking on Mass Incarceration

The path between creation and liberation is rarely as straight as this. The American carceral state is a patchwork of facilities that include federal and state prisons, local jails, federal holding cells for migrants and much more. Though certain conditions of privation unite them, they are not the same. Earlier this year, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that what we call the criminal justice system comprises “almost two million people in 1,566 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 2,850 local jails, 1,510 juvenile correctional facilities, 186 immigration detention facilities and 82 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals and prisons in the U.S. territories.” In total, the U.S. criminal justice system controls 5.7 million people, when one accounts for parole and probation. On top of that, it is estimated that more than 113 million Americans have an immediate family member who has been to prison or jail. The racial disparities are stark, particularly for Black Americans, who make up less than 15 percent of the total U.S. population but 38 percent of the nation’s incarcerated population. Though the overwhelming majority of Americans support reform, recent years have shown only halting progress toward substantive change.

IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of the 2020 protests prompted by the murder of George Floyd, politicians seemed more open than ever to the idea of legislative reform. Yet even in these seemingly hopeful moments, some artists and advocates sensed a vulnerability, an evasion. Too many who all of a sudden seemed to support change had arrived at that position without confronting and examining their own core beliefs and biases. As long as they could hold on either to the mollifying myth of innocence through stories of the wrongly accused or to the blurring rhetoric of analysis, cut off from the uncomfortable human particulars, they could stay committed to wholesale reform, at least in principle.

“I think for us to really understand the aesthetic and cultural impact of mass incarceration, we have to have works by people who are differently positioned by the carceral state in conversation with each other,” Fleetwood, the art historian and curator, says. “We can’t understand the sheer impact of the carceral state by just looking at the work of conceptual, socially engaged artists who are working out of art institutes or commercial galleries, nor can we just look at the work made by people held in captivity. We actually have to think expansively about culture making in this era.”

Among those thinking expansively is Ashley Hunt, 52, a multimedia artist and faculty member in the Program in Photography and Media at California Institute of the Arts in the Santa Clarita Valley. Several years ago, he noticed when visiting prisons how many facilities were disguised in the landscape, hidden in plain sight. This was no coincidence, he thought, but a calculated strategy to render invisible the massive system of warehousing human beings. What emerged was “Degrees of Visibility” (2010-present), a photographic project that has since grown to encompass correctional facilities in all 50 states and the country’s territories. Some of the images are startlingly beautiful; others are nondescript. We might see, Hunt explains, “a landscape that we think we recognize as bucolic, and then we realize that there are 4,372 men out of sight there.” Within his work, Hunt detects “a chance to trouble that distancing.” At the center of “Degrees of Visibility” is a struggle with the systemic, with how something can grow so beyond human scale that it becomes unfathomable. How do you describe something you can’t see? Focusing on the big picture mitigates against the “bad apple” claim — the idea that abuse is isolated to certain specific instances alone. “That’s how the system absolves itself of its guilt: ‘It was the bad cop,’ or ‘That’s the bad prison. We’re gonna fix it.’ We need to be looking at the overall structure,” Hunt says.