Taking Down the Walls from the Outside

(This story appeared in High Performance #71, Spring 1996.)

"...we're only as rich as the poorest of the poor,
only as free as a padlocked prison door..."
from "Power and Glory," a song by Phil Ochs

An isolation cell, video still from "Crimes and Punishment"

I have been involved in the so-called criminal world; but I never got caught. I have protested numerous issues vigorously, but I never got caught. I have had friends and family incarcerated in our nation's jails and prisons unreasonably and unjustly. I am both fascinated by and fearful of the total personal surveillance upon, and social disappearance of those incarcerated. Ironically, they are both constantly observed and utterly invisible.

Over the past 20 years I have created art work and protest that has addressed incarceration phenomena. My most recent project, "Correcting Corrections," had three intentions. One was to deal with the personal rage I had over the moral and political nature of incarceration and its absolute inefficiency as a social tool for controlling crime. The second was to make a videotape that would provide the general public with a survey of perspectives on the Wisconsin corrections system that might catalyze dialog and even social change. The aim was to expand perceptions beyond the Department of Correction's press releases that most mainstream media rely on. The third intention was to provide some grassroots prison-reform organizations with the creative resources to produce more effective media advocacy.

Early in 1992 I started reading The Edge, a now-defunct leftist Madison, Wisconsin, newspaper. Adrian Lomax, an award-winning prison journalist and jailhouse "lawyer," had a very articulate column on statewide prison issues and news. Lomax, a former biker, was sentenced to life at age 18 for what the State of Wisconsin alleges was a first-degree murder. He claims that in self-defense he stabbed one of two men who attacked him in a bar fight. Now completely self-educated, Lomax is a constant target of Department of Correction's staff and officials due to his writing and litigation. In an attempt to silence him the Department of Corrections punished Lomax with a three-year sentence of solitary confinement, using trumped-up charges involving the supposedly inflammatory nature of articles he had written for outside news publications. He served one full year of this sentence before public opinion and legal pressure cut his sentence short. His psychological deterioration was well documented in his letters to me and others. He stopped writing after a few months of confinement; it took him months to recover. The overt agenda of the State to silence a journalist who was chronicling the State's abuses of civil rights motivated me to somehow get involved.

Correspondence with Adrian Lomax, contact with local prison-rights activists and study of theories of incarceration led me to organize the "Correcting Corrections" project for Video Wedge, a committee of the Madison artist/activist group Safety Orange. The project was intended to catalyze collaborations between prison-rights activists, prisoners, correctional workers, media artists and public-access cable stations. My coproducers were prison-rights advocates Jackie and Glenn Austin, who are active in National CURE (Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants)—5,000 activists, prisoners, families of prisoners and their friends—and this collaboration brought the project to a grassroots community.

For the next eight months we were immersed in videotaping and editing interviews, taking prison tours, attending public hearings on corrections issues, lobbying press and politicians, maintaining an extensive correspondence with prisoners across the country and, of course, fundraising to make it all possible. The ignorance, pain, suffering and downright evil testified to in every interview confirmed that no one wins in this system. To quote one corrections worker, any positive outcome is "despite the system, not because of it." Every time I walked out of a correctional facility I was awash in guilt, relief and an awareness of my own privilege.

From the beginning there were numerous difficulties. As soon as the Wisconsin Department of Corrections found out I was interested in the Lomax case, every warden of every state prison was sent a slanderous letter blacklisting me from entering any state prison or interviewing any inmate. (The letter was leaked to me by a political aide; it severely distorted many facts about myself and the project.) Telephone interviews with key subjects were obtained through subtle channels. The wielding of State power was transparent. When African-American corrections officers staged a protest at the Department of Corrections offices, we launched a press phone and fax barrage, but not one station or paper covered the protest. Despite situations like this, grassroots publicity, press and support provided the impetus to continue.

The major documentary effort of the project, the "Crimes of Punishment" video produced, directed and edited by myself with Glenn and Jackie Austin, contains footage of prisoners, visitors, social workers, state legislators, prison officials and guards culled from more than 70 interviews. The interviews are montaged with extensive tours of the Dane County Jail and the Milwaukee House of Corrections, and with images of prisoner artwork from around the United States.

"Crimes of Punishment," which premiered in November 1993 to audiences of tens of thousands over Madison's WYOU and other local stations, has had more than 200 cable casts on at least 16 public-access stations in seven states. Three town meetings were held in Madison and project members did extensive advocacy work on prison issues in the state of Wisconsin. Radio, television and local press covered most of the well-attended events.

More than 150 copies have been mailed free to those interviewed, to media and political figures, and to schools and universities, and copies are still being shipped to various schools, colleges, prison activist organizations and individuals throughout the U.S.A. and Canada. The video has been smuggled into and screened in at least one prison by an outside educator. It is used in the youth program at the Tellurium Juvenile Crime and Recovery Center in Madison, and has been screened by investigators from the Federal Justice Department and the Federal Department of Health and Human Services.

the project's impact: so what?

So what was the impact of the "Correcting Corrections" project? Of my personal art/activism? The effects seem small. One person thanked me for telling their story ("…no one else seemed to want to…"). Another suggested that our little spotlight added to the public pressure that affected a progressive political decision. Resources were exchanged, some temporary and maybe even some long-term coalitions were formed. Skills were improved. And relentlessly an alternative was presented and diverse viewpoints were heard by at least a few thousand people. Maybe some of those people were moved to action, were inspired.

My primary disappointment is seeing the "Tough on Crime" (read "Criminalize Poverty") attitude that has taken hold in Wisconsin. The state was once known for a small, fairly progressive corrections system; now spineless politicians and their prison-business friends have spurred a building spate of expensive and ineffective prisons and jails throughout the state. There is legislation to bring back the death penalty (Wisconsin was the first state to abolish it), initiate chain gangs, build more costly and inhumane maximum security cells, drastically limit prisoner's Freedom of Information Act access and set up the infamous criminal-justice failure, the "Three Strikes and You're Out" law. Educational, health care and drug and alcohol dependency treatment programs are having their funds cut. In short, it's a human disaster, as expensive punitive ideologies obliterate any consideration of rehabilitation or other alternatives to incarceration. Basically we are in the process of building huge schools to turn amateur lawbreakers into career criminals.

Quite frankly, I have moved my focus to other issues and other art forms. I don't have the singular political commitment of Jackie and Glenn Austin or Adrian Lomax. But I have been changed by the experience. And I continue to be passionate about the issues and about the distribution of the "Crimes of Punishment" video. It's the least I can do, because there isn't a day that goes by when I don't think about the freedom I have, and how tenuous that freedom is.… I now have a much more profound understanding of the Phil Ochs song quoted at the start of this essay.

Marshall Weber claims he is a nice, but opinionated, leftist Jewish intellectual conceptual artist who works in assemblage, collage, cultural activism, video and performance (in which he includes teaching). He is an underpaid token radical Lecturer in New Genres and Cultural Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

This story originally appeared in High Performance #71, Spring 1996

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999