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Inside the Wire: Photographs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons B. Jackson. Austin, TX.: University of Texas Press (2013) 200pp. £60.00hb ISBN 029274496X; ISBN13 9780292744967

2016; Wiley; Volume: 55; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/hojo.6_12175

2059-1101

Ben Crewe,

Photography and Visual Culture

The tendency in prison scholarship to describe American imprisonment in uniform terms has always been problematic, given the range of prisons within the US. In this highly evocative collection of photographs, Bruce Jackson captures a particular time and place in the history of American imprisonment, specifically, the prison farms that characterised the correctional systems of the southern USA in the post-war decades. As he explains in his introductory notes, Jackson's original interest was not in these images themselves, but in using photographs as aides memoires for a book he intended to write about the songs sung by the African American convicts of the American South. Soon, though, the images became the main event, rather than the illustrative sideshow. They cover four main subjects: first, the farm work in which most prisoners were engaged on vast sites beyond the gates of the establishment; second, the inner world of the prisons, including prisoner dormitories, dining rooms and reception areas; third, the rodeo held at Cummins prison farm in Arkansas, of a kind that was common in southern agricultural prisons at the time, not least because they were highly profitable for these institutions; and fourth, a handful of images of a Texas Death Row unit. Interspersed within these images are 17 restored prisoner portraits from an earlier era, which Jackson chanced upon during his time in one of the prisons, and only recently restored. All of the images are shot in black and white, and blackness and whiteness dominate them thematically as well as compositionally. The book's sleeve notes comment that these farms ‘were not only modelled after the American slave plantation, but even occupied lands that literally were slave plantations before the Civil War’. Accordingly, then, all of the staff represented in these photographs are white, and in many images, all of the prisoners are black. Meanwhile, in the shots of the prison's interior, the flow of light through prison gates, windows and bars, its play upon the darkness of the walls and other surfaces, creates a striking and poignant, contrast. The photographs were taken between 1964 and 1979, but Jackson reflects in his introduction to the book that ‘little has changed about the prisons themselves’ (p.12) in terms of their functions as employment hubs for rural communities and repositories for those people whom society rejects. If anything, he notes, they are likely to be ‘even more crowded and more mean’ (p.29). The photographs do not, it seems to me, convey the brutal and insanitary nature of these two state systems, one of which had been declared unconstitutional shortly before Jackson's presence there, as a result of its conditions. Nor can they give a full sense of the back-breaking nature of the agricultural work, except in one image displaying a man whose hands are engraved with blisters, after his first day working the fields. However, they do capture the obscene absence of privacy within cramped, shared dormitories, the mundane life of the prison's inner world, its peculiar stillness, and a particular look that is typical of prison photographs in which the subject of the photograph looks impassively back at the camera, neither angry nor smiling, as if unable to summon or express normal human emotions. The book is dedicated, among others, to George Beto, Director of the Texas Department of Corrections, 1962–72, who awarded Jackson unsupervised access to the Texas prison system, and to Terrill Don Hutto who did the same in Arkansas. It is hard not to be struck by the extraordinary freedom that Jackson was given by these enlightened professionals, and by the way in which Jackson's freedom to roam enhances the quality of this wonderful collection. In effect, the images constitute a form of ethnography, the kind that documents the daily realities of a social space whose scrutiny is so vital.