You do not need to be one of the nearly two million Americans currently incarcerated to get an idea of the prison, whether precise or not. The public has long enjoyed Cool Hand Luke (1967) to the famous series of dramats Orange is the new black. But with Warehouse: a visual primer on mass incarcerationPublished by PM Press in June, the co-authors James Kilgore and the artist Vic Liu aim to offer a realistic visualization of contemporary life in prison and the complex history of the way the United States has built the world's largest incarceration system. On nearly 200 pages, they superimpose archive photographs of historical uprisings, graphic graphics highlighting the demography and the disproportionate population of black and Latin American people in prison, collages of the “war against drugs” and illustrations of the daily details described by imprisoned people.
Now writer and activist, Kilgore He himself spent six and a half years in the Californian penitentiary system in the 2000s after having lived as a fugitive in South Africa because of his involvement in a distant organization on the left. It is clear on its abolitionist position and supervises it in well documented terms. “The US government spends about $ 80 billion a year in prisons and prisons,” wrote Kilgore. “This $ 80 billion could: build 1,000 secondary schools; build 320,000 low -income apartments; pay the wages of a million nurses; Cover operating costs of 1.6 million wind turbines. ”
There is a submerged facts and figures in The warehouseAll dark. Black children are six times more likely to be detained than white children; One in six trans person has been incarcerated; The average prison cell is six by nine feet. But the illustrations accompanied by Liu – which have chosen to use only materials available to create art in prison – clarify the figures, thwart the tendency to reduce people to stereotypes or simple statistics. “I firmly believe that the text is elitist”, the artist recently said Them review. “Twenty percent of Americans are illiterate. We exclude so many people when we exclusively mean text information. ” Liu paints objects that do not present themselves to the representation of Hollywood of prison sentence, like melted red ms used as ad hoc lipstick or a tube sock on a telephone receiver, a practice which, according to the Marshall Project reportswas recommended for the protection of germs in a Washington prison.
The most evocative images of the book, however, undoubtedly result from a collaboration between people in “the outside” and those of “the interior”. Since 2009, the basic project Solitary photos requests Invites the long -term detainees in the lonely isolation to ask for a photograph of anything, then finds a volunteer to take it. The inclusion per Kilgore and Liu of these images recognizes the need for the agency of people imprisoned in their own stories. Photos of a frog on a rock at a pink sunset on the water, these images are as much part of the visual history of imprisonment as the infographics and sketches of daily life.
