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.
voices
National Poetry Month: Wayne Grant
“The Names They Call Us”
voices
National Poetry Month: Alexander Gallet
“Prisoner of Poetry”
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.
voices
National Poetry Month: Brandon Callender
“Incarcerated Slavery” & “2 crack a smile”
voices
Ink from Honey
In the introduction to our National Poetry Month series, an incarcerated poet reflects on how writing is helping him reclaim the story of his life.
voices
National Poetry Month: Amos Don
“Don Haitian Monument” & “The Hunters”
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.