I am wearing orange today in solidarity with Plain Human, a group of artists and designers in San Francisco and Northampton Massachusetts who are making March 11th Prisoner Awareness Day.

This week and last, prison issues have been prominent in the mainstream press, as more Americans are starting to see the physical and fiscal realities of rocketing incarceration rates, even if they have yet to feel the profound suffering it causes individuals, families, and communities. A Pew Center on the States report, which came out February 28th, offered the startling statistic that one in 99.1 adults in the United States is behind bars. Overwhelmingly, those incarcerated come from the least educated, most impoverished neighborhoods. If the distress of low-income communities and communities of color hadn’t got anyone’s attention, the price tag for putting and keeping people in jail or prison finally has. States, alone, are paying nearly $50 billion annually, on a par now with their spending for higher education.

Statistical comparisons with K-12 education are even more shocking. According to the Justice Policy Institute, spending at the local, state, and federal level on K-12 education rose 33% over the past 20 years, while spending on incarceration rose 571%. During this same time period, the number of K-12 teachers fell 8%, while the number of guards rose 250%; and the number of K-12 schools rose less than 3%, while the number of lockup facilities rose nearly 200%.

People are speaking up. Citizen groups in the South Bronx succeeded last week in stopping construction plans for a $375 million jail. And although Mississippi just approved 11 new prisons, State Senator Hob Bryan was brave enough to ask, “What sort of people are we? Where are our priorities?” Education and health care is where we should be directing our funds, not more jails, he asserted. And prisons should not be economic development pieces: “Shame on us. We are trying to make money by incarcerating our fellow humans.”

Indeed, Corrections Corporation of America, one of three publicly-traded, private prison operators in the United States, made more than $357 million in profits in 2006.

Art Reconsidering Incarceration

Artists and activists organized an extraordinary conference earlier this month at San Francisco State University, “Prison/Culture: Art, Ideas and Dialog,” where theater, film, dance, poetry, jazz, and visual and sculptural arts exposed the hidden impacts of prison. The event was produced by Intersection for the Arts’ Prison Project, a yearlong interdisciplinary exploration of the California prison system.

The most moving moments for me followed a powerful stage performance by the ESP Project that wove together two original plays about an incarcerated man and his lover, mother, alter ego, and others on the outside. Great script, acting, singing, dance that was raw and real. Next door, the SF State Fine Arts Gallery offered “Criminal: Art and Criminal Justice in America” with works of more than a dozen artists (on display through March 15). Julie Green’s “The Last Supper” covers one whole gallery wall with hundreds of Delft-like blue and white china plates of different sizes and shapes that she has glazed with depictions of the last meals requested by prisoners executed in the United States. Another wall is painted with a larger than life figure of Tookie Williams beside his advice to incarcerated youth and his last words to the public the night he was executed (12/13/05) at San Quentin.

At table displays I met founders and staff of California Prison Focus, who, among other things, prints and distributes a Survivors Manual for people sent to solitary confinement control units; Free Battered Women, who works with probono lawyers to free incarcerated abuse survivors; Buildingbloc, a collective of artists who run a Pen Pal Mutual Aid Project; The Beat Within, a weekly of writing and arts from inside; Campaign to End the Death Penalty; Critical Resistance; and many more.

New Village Press displayed Doing Time in the Garden by James Jiler, director of the Rikers Island jail-to-street GreenHouse and GreenTeam programs, and Beginner’s Guide to Community-Based Arts, which features illustrated stories about Rhodessa Jones’ Medea Project and 360 Degrees, which provides online perspectives on the US Criminal Justice System.

Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, our parent organization, collected signatures for ADPSR’s national Prison Design Boycott to protest the building of new prisons (have you signed it?). And founder of the Boycott and director of ADPSR’s Prison Alternatives Initiative, Raphael Sperry, spoke on one of five panels leading different afternoon discussions.

I brought home the sweet taste of freedom– a bag of Freelines, pralines made by conference presenter Robert King Wilkerson, the only member of the Angola 3 to be released six years ago (after 29 years in solitary confinement for a murder he did not commit). King, as he is known, has dedicated his life to winning freedom for other innocent men, including fellow inmates at Angola, Louisiana’s state penitentiary, where the average prison term is 88 years and only one in five prisoners ever leaves alive.

I also brought home the words of Dr. Angela Davis, who gave a rousing keynote with a closing worth framing:

What is justice?

Can it be something more than revenge? Something more than an eye for an eye?

Can we imagine a justice that does not exile those who have done harm to others beyond the borders of community? Can we imagine a justice that does not assume that one mistake should ruin an entire lifetime? Can we imagine a justice that calls for accountability and compensation by the persons who do harm and patience and forgiveness by the persons to whom harm is done. Can we imagine a justice that helps us move forward toward a society free of racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental violence and war?

Can we imagine a justice that encourages equality, individuality and creativity?

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