Notes mj notes to Gregory 7/27/14 at 10 pm

Angela Davis quote: “The very future of democracy depends on the ability to posit radical alternatives to the prison industrial complex. “

This is a little not-so-bright, FYI. Using it means that I have to darken the boxes behind it. A brighter (darker) orange in previous versions required the boxes to be less opaque.

_This quote below hasn’t been used yet — you mentioned you liked it but I personally think it’s already addressed. And we already have Frantz with a diff strong quote.

One of thing that is often overlooked in reentry work is a need to address questions like – “How can I be a productive member of society? What could my role be?” It’s a series of questions about individual purpose and validation. When a probationer or a parole ask “What makes me excited to get up out of bed in the morning?” He embraces the range of options available to him and moves beyond the limitations of his situation. If he can start focusing has life around his passions, it will add quality to his life to know himself better and will hopefully be validated in some way. I’m not saying that is going to keep him outside of prison. I just think it that is an incredible foundation to build on.

—Frantz Beasley, Founder and President, AZ Common Ground; formerly incarcerated

“I’m not just black and white. I’m just your normal Joe who made a couple bad decisions.”

“Last time I was in jail, before I got out, I wasn’t really prepared for the discouragement. I knew there was a reality out there, but I really didn’t appreciate – like oh – things are going to happen, and you’re not going to get everything you need. It’s going to be different. I kind of went, “Yeah, yeah, yeah I get it.” But in actuality, it turned out, that I didn’t really understand what they were saying at all.”

“Well I’m going back out to try to get something that I once had. And I remember it. And that was a sense that I could do anything.”
“At this point in my life I’ve learned that I don’t have much more time. I need to be for myself the best person I can be.”

Five minutes into the film, a thin young man in jeans and a t-shirt rises from his seat. He makes his way towards the aisle, then down to the front of the auditorium.

and another.

Going to the neutral site of the art museum, all these times, and participating as an equal in dialogues, has been phenomenal. Imagine an event where you have a former convict and leader in the reentry community, a victim’s mother, a restorative justice advocate, a Public Defender, the County Attorney, Sheriff Joe Arpaio and myself as the Chief Probation Officer, all at the same table in a wonderful space talking about the impact of visual culture and incarceration.

—Barbara Broderick, Chief Probation Officer, Maricopa County
[image of audience in a darken auditorium watching the film ]
In the final scenes of the film, corrections officers march the inmates back to the loading dock. Moments of actual sound break the silence – orders are given, chains rattle.
A man is locked back into handcuffs. With that metallic click, all sense of exuberance and accomplishment drain from his face. 
Inmates are ushered into caged compartments within the van. 

The harsh sound of one van door slams shut. The other punches through the silence.

Here now in civilian clothes they resemble the other audience members.

Byron Frank: I got an invitation from Gregory to come tonight. I made it a point to come back here, just to see myself. I didn’t want to see myself in that position, but it is a good wake up call to see myself. I hitchhiked from the rez (the Navajo Reservation) to Flagstaff and then caught the bus. I just did everything I needed to do to get here, see the film and participate.

—William Eric Paskell

Sue Ellen Allen: I served seven years at Perryville for a securities fraud crime, and this is my family. These are my sisters. These are my brothers. When I had breast cancer in Sheriff Joe’s jail the drug addicts, the prostitutes, and the thieves looked after me. I will never forget.

Joshua Adams: I remember going from the jail into the ASU Art museum, and the one thing that they did was in their interaction with us was just... that they had no expectations of us. They loved on us. And we were coming from our jail cells, this confined life. And they were, like, buying us Starbucks and buying us pizza. We had only been eating like beans and slop. It really had an impact on all of us. We were a part of this whole situation, this art, so I think that’s the key here. Just to accept someone without expectations -- without thinking first whether they have felonies or whether they have no felonies or whatever the situation is -- but to love them and to care for them.

When I came on as a participant and sometimes collaborator in these projects, I was a graduate student in photography in the School of Art at ASU. I started photography about ten years ago to make my brain stop screaming after my daughter was abducted on her way to school. A man took her behind dumpsters and raped her and tried to cut her throat. We went through a lot with the case that as ‘victims’ was not helpful. The rape crisis center that was really involved in the trail never offered to help my daughter. The official victim’s advocate was very interested in talking about it on the news but never met us in person. Over time a friend became our victims’ advocate, and her husband, a local constable, helped us prepare for trial.

Our culture values justice. We’ve developed potent systems of punishment. But we are not organized to help people seek and grant forgiveness.  Even in the most painful of circumstances, some extraordinary people choose to forgive. I am not sure I could do it myself.  I realized that some people are simply unwilling to accept for themselves, or their family, a life yoked to a horrific incident in the past.  Those people committed themselves to more fully understanding the people incarcerated in our jails, and to rehumanizing those who have committed sometimes dehumanizing crimes. 

Just to be involved in projects with artists, and professors and policy makers at the university art museum and then at the Phoenix Art Museum had a real impact on the inmates and the formerly incarcerated who participated. Most of these men and women never even considered going inside those buildings before. They thought that those institutions were not for them. But now to be in the film or up on stage, and asked about their life experiences makes it evident that their participation mattered and that their lives matter.

(I need to double check my info here, Gregory) The modern museum and the prison as we know them today in fact formed as post-Enlightenment initiatives predicated on the idea that through culture and the right kind of conditioning we can shape the human spirit. Describing the ideology behind both civic institutions as active agents of subject formation, Michel Foucault writes… “XXX.” In other words, both museum and prison were intended to reform and improve citizens. We find this parallel in the mission statements of each. [here stick in the mission statement of a prison versus a museum and make the comparison.] The logistics involved in transposing participants from prison to museum — high security vans, armed guards, handcuffs, a complicated paper trail of waivers —  tell this self-same story as a material history of apparatus, methods, and bureaucracy.

Seeing the documentation of what transpired during the creation of these works — I was not there — I find myself revisiting inchoate memories that I tend to forget about myself, or at least tend not to disclose. The immigrant household in which I grew up took topsy turvy rides between an upper middle class neighborhood and an informal hand-to-mouth economy. Now, my parents — now past retirement —find themselves in successive temporary housing situations, borrowing to make the rent when their income dips below the poverty line. As a teen, I acceled at school and found myself a school leader — yet somehow had very low expectations for myself with homelessness never far away. Drugs were a normal part of my adolescence; crime was somehow normalized within my group of friends. I took on what others might think of as unseemly jobs to get a glimpse of how bad things could really get and to willfully shock myself — a self-induced wake-up call that I seemed to crave when things got out of control. I never quite understood how this all happened. Things just informally unfolded one thing after another without a plan. As I read through Gregory’s work, blurry-eyed with tears, I identify with the inmates — the precarity of their lives, their honesty in not being prepared for what would come, the remarkable capacity to forgive themselves, the suspension of judgement. I could have been one of them, I think to myself as I learn about this work. And I am reminded of those graces we call mercy and dignity.

We are quite comfortable saying that law enforcement is harsh; and that ‘they don’t care about the population as a whole.’ We are also comfortable saying that inmates are not like us; and that ‘we will never be like them.’  In keeping those separations distinct, there’s a false sense of safety.

—MaryEllen Sheppard, Deputy Chief, Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (at time of statement); currently Assistant County Manager, Maricopa County, Arizona

I think one of the things that struck me the most about these projects is it is only the second time I have participated in something where the criminal justice system made a real effort to actually go out into the community.  Something profound happened. To take the criminal justice system, to take ourselves, inmates, and even some of our working meetings out into the public and specifically into a museum, we meet those folks where they are and live in public, instead of expecting them to come to us where we are so safe and secure in our positions. 

—Amy Rex, Manager, Criminal Justice Projects, Maricopa County Manager’s Office (at time of statement); currently Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Commander, Inmate Programs and Services

The most salient testimonials to the power of this artwork are the diverse voices of those for whom the work provokes profound reflection and invites the capacity for things anew.

—John Spiak, Curator, ASU Art Museum (at time of statement); currently Director and Chief Curator, Grand Central Art Center, California State University, Fullerton

Gregory Sale’s artwork sketches formulas for dialogues that can lead to understanding and, in some cases, events and direct action. It’s not just black and white opens up a novel context – a space shaped by the artists and museums – for recognizing the complexity of a contemporary very social and political problem and a way of redefining it – or seeing it anew thereby progressing toward a solution.

—Arthur Sabatini
Section 4: written in Gregory’s voice
…
Today in the United States, 2.4 million people are serving time. Held in state and federal prisons, juvenile correctional facilities and local jails, nearly all, 97 percent of those people will be released. Each year 680,000 people are released from prison, and almost 12 million people cycle through local jails. If we add up all offenders who are formally under some form of correctional supervision—i.e., have been placed in jail or prison, or on probation or parole—the total comes to one in every 31 adults.
A breakdown of statistics reveals that incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment: people of color and those living below the poverty line are disproportionately incarcerated, at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts—one in every 11 African-American adults, one in every 27 Latino/a adults, and one in every 45 white adults.
In Arizona, 20,000 people get released from state prison annually; that figure does not include individuals completing sentences in jail or others forms of judicial oversight. In Maricopa County alone there are 54,000 people under the supervision of adult probation at any given time.
These numbers are staggering and have followed a trend of exponential expansion since the United States began the War on Drugs in the 1970. Skyrocketing incarceration rates since the 1980s and 1990s today designate the United States as the world leader in incarceration.

…
In Arizona, where these projects unfolded, ideals of the Old West seem to set the tone for a harsh and punitive culture of incarceration. The state itself is often a political flash point for gun rights, incarceration and immigration issues. Some Arizonans argue that mass incarceration has grown out of hand and is too expensive. They advocate for solutions that are cheaper, preventative, less disruptive to families and communities, and just as safe. Many other Arizonans strongly disagree, stating that however expensive and distasteful, incarceration is necessary and cannot be reduced. Everyone cares; we just have different ideas that we hold passionately about how specific challenges should be addressed. Responses in the news media and the political realm are often extreme and polarized. They indicate a loss of an ability to listen to one another or a willingness to engage in conversation.

Approximately, two-thirds of those who return to society will be rearrested within three years. This cyclical structure creates profound collateral consequences for public safety, state and federal budgets, health risks, and weakened ties among families and communities.

That summer evening at the Phoenix Art Museum began with the cinematic presentation of inmates in characteristically striped prison uniforms painting black and white stripes on a gallery wall. The film screening, performance and subsequent discussion brought together a range of museum patrons, ex-offenders, their families, probation officers, criminal justice workers and others. This spectrum of those in attendance included individuals with access to social and political power and others with limited or almost no discernable social standing.

Process
Too often representatives for disenfranchised and imprisoned populations are not included in the conversation around criminal justice reform, and when they are, persistent power structures push these voices to the margins. These voices need to be heard when community comes together to consider reforming the current systems.