This essay introduces the January 2012 volume of the Journal of Museums & Social Issues: ReThinking Incarceration, co-edited with Kris Morrissey.

1. The Culture of Incarceration
Introduction to Museums and Social Issues: Re-thinking Incarceration, Volume 6:
Issue 1 (December 2012).
Marjorie Schwarzer
Consider these sobering statistics. Americans comprise five percent of the
world‟s population. Yet, the U.S. incarcerates nearly twenty-five percent of the
world‟s prisoners (Herivel & Wright, 2007). As of 2010, the nation was holding
under lock and key over1.5 million inmates, with an additional 5.7 million adults
comprising probation and parolee counts. (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2010; Ross
and Richards, 2002). And these numbers do not include juvenile offenders nor the
spouses and children impacted when a family member is behind bars.
According to research conducted by the Amnesty International, the majority of
those caught in the corrections system are first-time offenders; over 50 percent
were convicted for possession or sale of narcotics(www.prisonpolicy.org). Since
the War on Drugs and enactment of habitual offender (three strikes) laws in
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2. twenty-five states, the number of American prisons has grown at an alarming rate,
especially in rural communities enticed by promises of jobs. During the 1990s and
early 2000s, spending in the U.S. for incarceration increased by over 500%, with
large contracts going to private suppliers of all manner of bedding, clothing, food,
concertina wire. (Herivel and Wright, 2007) Despite the influx of money,
conditions in American jails and prisons are generally deplorable. Overcrowding,
rancid food, minimal exposure to the natural light, insufficient health care, and
relentless loud noise are common even in minimum security situations. Gang
violence, hunger strikes and constant surveillance add to the stress. To make
matters worse, rehabilitation programs like college courses and vocational training
have been cut in favor of “get-tough-lock‟em-up-and-throw away the key” penal
policies and practices touted by vote-seeking politicians. (Greene, 2006; Hunter &
Wagner, 2007). As justice policy analyst Judith Greene explains: “The astonishing
upward shift in our incarceration rate has swept this country into the uncharted
territory of mass incarceration.” (p. 26).
Economists, sociologists and criminologists largely agree: the current U.S. penal
system is inefficient and ineffective at deterring crime and making society safer. It
is also inequitable. Harvard University sociologist Bruce Western has
characterized the gargantuan American penal system as a “novel institution in a
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3. uniquely American system of social inequality. (Western, p. 11).” A look at who is
behind bars not only reflects American politics and economics, but a legacy of
racism as well as discrimination against its poorest and least educated citizens.
Over 40 percent of inmates are Black; 20 percent are Hispanic. Forty percent did
not complete high school.
“Amazingly,” writes former inmate Paul Wright, “American pop culture has
largely succeeded in … ensuring that the general population of non-prisoners does
not believe that what occurs in prisons affects them.” (Wright, 2000) Now editor-
in-chief of Prison Legal News based in Vermont, Wright has written extensively
about the media‟s role in promoting and exploiting prison as a ghastly underworld
culture, far from the realities of “normal” day-to-day life. Through sensationalist
reality TV shows like COPS, LockUp and Inside, law enforcement professionals
and prisoners provide nightly entertainment to millions of viewers. Switch the
channel to MTV, and watch entertainers sporting orange jumpsuits and rapping
about life in prison (Wright, personal communication, 2011) These popular shows
are so skewed that, in the words of sociologist John Leveille, “they tell us more
about the values of mass media than they present factual information about
prisons.” (personal communication, 2011)
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4. Wright has also documented how the clothingindustry grossly exploits prison
culture. “The baggy ill fitting clothes of the prison yard are sold as cool fashion
statement,” he reports. In Wright‟s opinion, ”the most blatant, and successful,
example is the Prison Blues line of clothing, made by the Oregon prison system
using prisoner slave labor.” He goes on to explain that“Oregon prison officials
market the clothes with catchy slogans like „Made on the inside to be worn on the
outside.‟ One ad shows a picture of the jeans next to an electric chair with the
caption „Sometimes our jeans last longer than the guys who make them.” (Wright,
2000)
What does America‟s culture of incarceration have to do with museums? A
great deal, it turns out.San Francisco‟s notorious former federal penitentiary
Alcatraz Island (reviewed in this issue) – is one of the nation‟s most visited
museums.As Wright has observed: “Chambers of commerce in
Leavenworth, Kansas and Canon City, Colorado, market their many prisons
as must see sites for tourists. Expensive ad campaigns use catchy slogans
like „How about doin' some time in Leavenworth?‟ … Tours of actual
prisons are not offered. Instead, tourists can see prison museums and prisons
that were closed due to their age.” (Wright, 2000) Over 100 prison museums
operate in the world; two-thirds are in the United States. This does not
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5. include the ubiquitous historical society displays of prison-related material
culture like shackles, handcuffs, and correctional officer badges, popular
(and money-making) museum-prison souvenirs like whiskey shot glasses
bearing prison logos orprograms like “Halloween Behind Bars,” and “Terror
Beyond the Walls.”
What kinds of messages do these museums and exhibitions communicate? Are
they copacetic with our field‟s educational values? Or, do they glorify and titillate
in the name of entertainment and voyeurism? This issue of Museums & Social
Issues asks the museum field to think more deeply about the connections between
museums and prisons.
Since the 1970s, post-modern theorists have likened museums‟ fortress-like
architecture and closed-off and guarded collections of sequestered objects to
imprisonment. The French philosopher Michel Foucault‟s Discipline and Punish
(1974) and subsequent analysis within the museological literature (Bennett, 1990;
Lord, 2006) pushes this metaphor further, analyzing prisons‟ mechanisms of
power, control and classification and then implicating museums in participating
with and manifesting these values. Some of these dense assertions have not stood
the test of time – after all, museums now strive toward discourse and access while
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6. prisons do their utmost to remain authoritative and intimidating. What role can
museums play in promoting thoughtful discourse about our culture of
incarceration?
Since the 1970s many museums have reached out to inmates through
programming. Art museums, for example, sponsor programs where educators work
with prison populations, providing materials and art instruction to inmates. We
know that art-making has therapeutic value and can be helpful and healing to
inmates and their families. As Shawna Meiser, who recently curated an exhibit of
art created by Pennsylvania prisoners for the Samek Gallery at Bucknell
University, explains: “the inmates who participate in art programs maintain better
behavior while serving their sentences, and that engagement with the arts helps
inmates transition more successfully back into society.” (Meiser, 2011) Yet,these
kinds of educational programs are extremely challenging to implement. Museum
educators are often unprepared for the procedural as well as emotional factors they
must deal with when they work with the prison system. These concerns echo
throughout this issue. Museums are to be applauded for their programming efforts.
Yet is there an even larger role that we can play? Can museums help to enlighten
the public and serve as a call to action for prison reform, compassion and debate
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7. about justice? Can they give voice to the marginalized population behind bars and
allow them to share their stories directly with the public?
This issue offers no easy answers to the above questions. Rather its purpose is to
open a dialogue about the role of museums within the American culture of
incarceration. The subjects of criminology, violence, law enforcement and the
justice system are extraordinarily complex; this issue only begins to touch on
questions that need a great deal more study and consideration.
The opening contribution to this issue is a call to action from a former inmate.
Alan Mobley, now a professor of criminal justice at San Diego State University,
presents his vision for the Prisoners Center For Reentry And Reconciliation, a
place of healing, reflection and action. He calls on the museum field to get
involved.
We next turn to the perspectives of educators and artists who have recently created
programs and exhibitions within museums that reflect and respond to the issue of
prison culture in the United States. The institutions discussed are the Eastern State
Penitentiary Museum in Philadelphia, the Hull House Museum in Chicago, the
Rubin Museum of Art in New York City and Arizona State University Museum of
Art in Tempe (ASUMA).
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8. Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP) in Philadelphia, one of the most historic prisons in
the world, is known for its architecture and rehabilitation programs designed to
inspire penitence (the root of the term “penitentiary”). After it opened in 1829, the
French reformer Alexis de Tocqueville visited and viewed it as an indication of
America‟s advanced understanding of criminology. It remained in operation until
1971, and is now a historic site and museum. In his articleThe Jury Is Out:
Programming at Eastern State Penitentiary, Sean Kelley, ESP‟s director of
exhibitions and education, describes how conceptual artists‟ on-site installations
investigate racism, homophobia, victims‟ rights and other social issues associated
with incarceration. Kelley wonders how the field can measure the impact of such
exhibitions on the public. Are artists better equipped to explore touchy topics than
historians? By closing with a description of his own efforts to organize a history
exhibition about two inmates (one is still alive and serving a life sentence for
murder in another facility), he concludes that the “jury is out” as to how to use the
medium of exhibition to explore deeply disturbing topics.
In 2011, the Hull House Museum in Chicago developed a participatory exhibition
about the history and present day realities of Cook County juvenile justice system.
As Lisa Yun Lee, Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Teresa Silva discuss in their article,
Making Incarceration Visible: The Unfinished Business of Hull-House
Reformers, the exhibition‟s goal was not only to “critique the prison industrial
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9. complex,” but to give visitors tools to carry on the activist legacy of the museum‟s
founding social reformers and “do something about it.”
What happens when educators offer programs for those incarcerated at jails and/or
prisons? InThe Emotional World of Museum Educators: Teaching Himalayan
Art at Riker’s Island, Marcos Stafner and Becky Utech Gaugler describe an
interactive art class offered by Rubin Art Museum staff during 2008 and 2009 for
juveniles offenders housed at New York City‟s main jail complex. Entries from
Gaugler‟s journal document her feelings of “stress, anger, fear and frustration”
each time she delivered the program and her “guilt” at being able to leave the
complex when the class was over, while her students remained jailed. The authors
suggest that museums need to better prepare educators for their on-site experiences
when working with non-traditional audiences.
Curator John Spiakintroduces the final articles in this section which discuss the
exhibition, performance and educational program It’s Not Just Black and White
held at Arizona State University Museum of Art. A centerpiece of this effort was
Phoenix-based artist Gregory Sale‟s two-pronged work, intended to turn both
prison and museum culture inside-out. In early 2011, Sale brought prisoners from
Maricopa County‟s jail to the museum to paint black and white stripes on its walls.
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10. From there, he brought museum visitors into the local “tent city jail” to expose
them to “life on the inside.” This innovative project broke down both
institutions‟ “surveillant mechanisms of disciplinary power,” according to
Chema Salinas, a doctoral student in Performance Studies and Rhetoric at
Arizona State University. (Salinas, 2011)
In his article, Museums and New Aesthetic Practices, Arthur J. Sabatini
analyses the political and institutional significance of It’s Not Just Black and
Whiteby discussing its“relational boundary-setting aesthetics.” Among the
important questions Sabatini raises about the project are: “What aesthetics are
involved? What is represented in such a project? What is the “position” of the museum,
politically, in such a context?” Sabatini‟s piece is followed by choreographer Elizabeth
Johnson‟sessay Mother/Daughter Distance Dance. Johnson used platforms (like
Skype) to engage four inmate mothers at Phoenix‟s Estrella Jail in a virtual dance
at the Arizona State University Museum with their daughters. While Sabatini‟s
perspective is political and aesthetic, Johnson‟s is personal. Her project was
fraught with risk and emotion: “this experience has had a profound effect on me
professionally and personally, the extent of which I have not fully processed.”
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11. In theReviewsection, our reviewers look at three radically-different museums and
two books. Paul M. Farber analyzes the National Museum of Crime and
Punishment, complete with a crime lab and shooting range and located just blocks
from the White House in Washington DC. Lexie Waite takes the boat to San
Francisco‟s Alcatraz, known as “the Rock” and the most visited prison museum in
the US. Anne E. Parsons visits the Rotary Jail Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana,
which was recently converted to an art center.
Myriad books and studies exist about the sociology and politics of prisons. We
highlight two award-winning volumes that approach the topic from the
perspectives of memoire and poetry. The first, reviewed by Margaret Kadoyama,
is a first-person memoire by Sue Ellen Allen of her seven years behind bars. The
second, One Big Self, reviewed by Shin Yu Pai, presents a poet‟s response to a
collaboration between inmates at the Angola State Prison in Louisiana and a
photographer.
Diana Falchuk concludes the issue with reflections on her experiences, and she
ends where we began: with a call to action. In 2003, working with the Museum of
Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art in Tacoma, Falchuk helped
to develop a series of workshops between artists and young women
incarcerated at Remann Hall, the Pierce County youth detention center.
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12. Although the Tacoma project, like all of the programs discussed in this issue,
was laced with internal and external politics and emotions, Falchuk believes that
museums have much to offer both the public and those who are incarcerated: “The
need is there,” she concludes, “So what are museums waiting for?”
When we distributed the call for papers for this issue, we received enormous
interest in this topic. Clearly we have tapped into an area of concern that deserves
far more discussion and analysis than we can offer here. We were not able to
include perspectives on prisons and prison museums in other nations, prisoners of
war, police museums, gender issues, the history of prisons, and other very
important topics that merit further attention in the museum field.
The voices of those who are currently incarcerated are missing from this issue. In
theopening article Alan Mobley reminds us that “prisoners, former prisoners, their
families and victims of crime” are among the most marginalized people in the
United States. Museums & Social Issues does not seek to perpetuate or participate
in this historic oppression. We call readers‟ attention to the resources below, as
well as the numerous citations in each article, which provide ways to directly
communicate with prisoners and/or access their perspectives.
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13. About the Author
Marjorie Schwarzer served as Professor and Chair of Museum Studies at John F.
Kennedy University from 1996 to 2011. She is currently on the faculty of the
Bank Street College Museum Leadership Program and California College of the
Arts. A second edition of her award-winning book, Riches, Rivals and Radicals:
100 Years of Museums in America (2006: American Association of Museums) will
be released in May 2012.
References
Bureau of Justice Statistics (2010), Retrieved August 16, 2011 from
http://bjs.ojp.usdog.gov.
Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site (www.easternstate.org), accessed 17
August 2011.
Greene, J. (2006). Banking on the Prison Boom. In Herivel, T., & Wright, P. (Eds.)
(2007). Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration. (pp. 3 –
26). New York: The New Press.
Herivel, T., & Wright, P. (Eds.) (2007). Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money
from Mass Incarceration. New York: The New Press.
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14. Hunter, G. & Wagner, P. (2007). Prisons, Politics and the Census. In Herivel, T., &
Wright, P. (Eds.) (2007). Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass
Incarceration. (pp. 80 - 89). New York: The New Press.
Lord, B. (2006). Foucault‟s museum: difference, representation and geneology.
Rathbone, C. (2005). A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars. New
York: Random House.
Meiser, S. (2011), Accessed on www.bucknell.edu/samek (1 November 2011).
Prison Policy Initiative. (www.prisonpolicy.org) (accessed 23 November 2011).
Ross, J. I., & Richards, S. C. (2002). Behind Bars: Surviving Prison. Indianapolis:
Alpha Books.
Salinas, C. (2011). Penalizing the Museum; Museumizing the Penal. (unpublished
manuscript).
Western, B. (2006). Punishment and Inequity in America. Russell Sage
Foundation.
Wright, P. (2000). The Cultural Commodification of Prisons. Social Justice.
Accessed on http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3427/is_3_27/ai_n28811188/
(26 October 2011).
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15. Other Recommended Resources:
A large volume of research exists on the topic of incarceration and several
excellent sources are listed below each article in this issue. This list provides
additional information to those who wish to research this topic further:
Website:
American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project
This comprehensive site lists legal and other informational sources that support
those advocating that prisoners are treated in accordance with human rights
principles.
http://www.aclu.org/prisoners-rightsCenter for Rational Correctional Policy
Journal of Prisoners on Prison
A forum for research by convicts, ex-convicts and scholars
www.cspi.org/books/p/prisoners.htm
Prison Legal News
This independent 56-page monthly magazine provides up-to-date analysis of
prisoner rights, court rulings and news about prison issues.
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/FAQ.aspx
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16. Prison Visitation and Support
PVS trains and coordinates motivated volunteers to visit with inmates in maximum
and medium security federal prisons.
www.prisonervisitation.org/
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