Prison Index
What do we know, through images, of prisons and jails in the United States? What do we see of the sprawling, brutalizing, and failed systems? How do taxpayers view their prisons? Which images shape our imagination of and future responses to mass incarceration?
In 2008, I founded Prison Photography, an ongoing research project that examines and contextualizes images of U.S. prisons. It started as a blog—a personal inquiry played out in public. By virtue of longevity and quantity, it has morphed into a public resource, a digital archive that, in some ways, serves as a form of memory. When I began, I thought images could serve as a way to draw people into the uneasy conversations about fear, mass incarceration, inequality, institutional violence, and vengeance. Prison Photography’s over fifteen hundred posts have scrutinized news, documentary, surveillance, fine art, evidentiary, and collaborative images. Thousands of instructive photographs and hundreds of vital testimonies speak to forty years of tumorous prison growth. Here, I’d like to mention just a few. They include rare prisoner-made images from
