culture
The Prison They Let You See
The San Quentin Film Festival offered a feel-good image of prison life—one far removed from the reality faced by most incarcerated Californians.
art
17 posts in ‘art’
culture
Survival Art
“Art is not a leisure activity. Art is a redemptive, powerful, meditative, actionable force within a person—within a human being.”
Photo Essay
Resisting Creatively
In Pittsburgh, a collective of incarcerated and non-incarcerated artists is dreaming of a world without mass incarceration.
In Their Words
Poems on Policing
Poetry has the power to help us grow past the stale and rote ways of thinking about safety that tend to characterize policy discussions.
Essay
Soft Boiled
Most crime novels make detectives into heroes and offer resolution through punishment. Could a different kind of crime novel help us imagine a decarceral future?
Film review
Big-Screen Abolition
Films that imagine decarceral futures are a cultural antidote for the carceral messages and aesthetics so prevalent in popular media.
Q&A
Picturing the Crisis
A new book uses art to make the horrors of mass incarceration as visual, and visceral, as possible.
poetry
The Names They Call Us
“I applaud, your / Frankenstein’s monster, forevermore.”
poetry
Prisoner of Poetry
“What does it mean to be an / incarcerated poet?”
Essay
Hip Hop Is My Life
I spit bars on Death Row to preserve the legacy of our people, what’s been done to us, and how we’ve fought back.
poetry
“Incarcerated Slavery” & “2 crack a smile”
“The cotton field / is replaced by walls of steel . . . ”
first person
Ink from Honey
Poetry can help incarcerated authors to reclaim the story of their life.
poetry
“Don Haitian Monument” & “The Hunters”
“Paralyzed in shock / by slave raid tactics, / my trembling hands on the wall . . .”
campaigns
Beauty on the Inside
A look at how decarceral, abolitionist filmmaking can help us envision new worlds.
first person
Envisioning Futures
The art of knowing what we’re confronting and revealing who is being made invisible by the carceral state.
Essay
The Power of Fiction
More people impacted by the criminal legal system can and should share their stories through fiction—and through those stories change minds and public policy.
advocacy
The Art of Freedom
How two formerly incarcerated artists are creating a community for people like them—and exposing mass incarceration through it.