The most prolific contributor to the newspaper was Scott “Scotty Scott” Smith. He was featured in All of Us or None in September 2020 after he sent an ink and pencil drawing entitled COVID Creature.2 It reminded me of a Ralph Steadman caricature from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Crooked fingers hold a circular object detailed with a grid pattern over a misshapen face. I couldn’t stop looking at it and was even more taken aback when I saw it was made with simple tools I had in my desk pen holder.
I scanned the image and published it alongside a column about COVID inside prisons written by an incarcerated contributor. I sent three issues to Scotty with a personal note and a list of topics I planned to cover in the months ahead. Within weeks, he sent a drawing for the October “Election Issue,” an image drawn in a completely different style. It is full color, and while still a bit cartoonish, not at all abstract like the COVID creature. It portrays a man in an orange hoodie and baggy jeans with a backpack, arms crossed, and eyes covered by sunglasses. He stands between two signs, one yellow that reads “It’s Not Too Late . . . So VOTE And . . .” and a stop sign that reads “Stop Hate.”
I used Scotty’s drawings in so many consecutive issues that I had to hold off for a couple of months to ensure other artists were being recognized. But then he sent me Bigger Than Life, a black-ink portrait of Rep. John Lewis. Scotty’s delicate pen strokes depicted Lewis’s stoic yet booming presence, his eyes focused and determined above carefully shadowed cheekbones. After printing it in the March 2021 issue, I framed it and put money in Scotty’s commissary account with the memo “fine art.” Mounted above my desk as I write this, the drawing still moves me.
Our correspondence continued after I left All of Us or None. Scotty still contributes to the paper, and about a year after I left I saw his drawing Not Feeling the Freedom, which prefaces chapter 3, on the cover of another issue. It had also been published by Prison Journalism Project, a fairly new enterprise that mentors and features incarcerated writers and brings their work into the mainstream.
“The Statue of Liberty is supposed to symbolize freedom for all American people, but the statue is an imposter,” Scotty wrote on the PJP website. “The only ones who are free in this country are the super-rich. They can do whatever they want and get away with it because money buys power. Everyone I know in prison is poor. Poverty is what causes crime—it’s always been this way.”3
Scotty still sends me incredible works of art, including the two other pieces featured in this book. The portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that leads into chapter 5 is in a similar style to the John Lewis drawing hanging above my desk. The World Right Now, the acrylic that introduces chapter 7, has this inscription on the back: “It doesn’t matter if one is black, white, red, or brown. We are all just bricks. We are all just the same inside. It is amazing to me most people don’t get it. As Pink Floyd once sang, ‘We are all just bricks in the wall.’ It should go without saying black bricks matter and without them, the whole thing comes tumbling down.”
I can’t offer Scotty much of an exchange in the way of art—I have a hard enough time staying within the lines of my son’s coloring books—but I do maintain a close relationship with him. We check in regularly on a ViaPath Technologies–issued tablet, a recent technological advancement in prison communications that allows prisoners to send digital correspondence and schedule video visits.
For most of our friendship, Scotty has been incarcerated in the state prison in Corcoran, California. We have never spoken on the phone, nor have we had any video visits. He tells me he’s “grown old in prison,” that he’s lost most of his teeth due to “things that happened in here,” and requested I not include a photo of him in this book. Instead, he sent me probably my favorite work of his to date, Self Portrait, which precedes this note. To me it embodies everything this book is about: the complex web of colors and shapes that define our humanity, the array of perceptions our faces provoke in different onlookers, and the demand and challenge to absorb every detail.
“I have realized in myself a sense of wanting fairness and prosperity for everyone in the world regardless of who they are, what their creed and whatever the sexual preference, so long as it hurts no one else,” Scotty wrote in the note accompanying the portrait. “I feel deep inside me a call to fight the Good fight for all people, however especially for my people, my fellow inmates and convicts, no matter what kind of mistakes they have made.”
In my mind, Scotty looks like a moving shadow, his features indiscernible and his voice rendered mute. In the absence of physical attributes, I am able to unearth what truly connects us. To me, he is his passion for art. He is a person who can find beauty in both color and grayscale, who uses whatever he has to make something great in the hopes that it will be seen by even a single person on the outside. On the back of each drawing he’s sent is a note: “Use it if you want, or just enjoy it.”
Of the three artists featured in this book, only Scotty remains in prison. As he enters his second decade of incarceration, he only asks one thing in return for his work: That you look at it, and that by seeing it, he may be seen as well.
“There is no must in art because art is free.”
—Wassily Kandinsky
Prison art, by its very nature, is revolutionary. Simply creating art in a system designed to deprive people of identity and beauty is a form of protest. It is an expression of freedom in a world of restrictions and cages. For many incarcerated individuals, this possession of their internal freedom to create is both what keeps them going and what makes their work so devastatingly beautiful.
I want to acknowledge Peter Merts, a photographer, whose portraits of Gerald’s work and art from other California prisoners created a conduit between myself and the incarcerated artists I’ve met and been inspired by. Peter not only photographs these works of art in a professional way, but he also captures the joy and passion each artist experiences in creating them, with candid shots of different classes. This human element helps visitors of his website see these men and women as artists, not prisoners or faceless producers. I encourage you to visit PeterMerts.com to learn more about arts in the carceral setting.
Gerald, Carnell, and Scotty were compensated for their contributions to this book. Each one volunteered his work at first, but their generosity was denied for two important reasons. I relay them here in hopes that future collaborations become more equitable between artists who have experienced incarceration and those who are perhaps working with them for the first time.
The more obvious reason is hypocrisy. The following pages will dive into the dehumanization that occurs in the prison-industrial complex and the exploitation of prison labor. There can be no advocacy against slavery and involuntary servitude if we proliferate the very nature of these practices. While the use of “forced” labor may not be relevant here, the potential for exploitation—either intentional or by accident—is always present. “As far as I’m concerned, your days of working for nothing are done,” I said to Gerald.
The second is artistry. I’ve paid Scotty for works I’ve never used in a newspaper or book because I consider his work valuable, and him an artist, and, as such, compensate him accordingly. The drawings in Reimagining the Revolution could easily go for six figures at some of the Pier 39 galleries Gerald walked by on his way to work, but context is important. And while society may see the context of a gallery as heightening the value of a piece of art, I see the context in which incarcerated works are designed as reason to elevate prison art to an even higher level of worth. I see their boldness and their unwavering dedication to freedom as inspiring and awesome, in the biblical sense. It’s hard to put a price on that kind of context, but it’s worth at least throwing a few figures around.
Preface
When I started writing this book and interviewing the people it would include, I was often asked why. Why this topic? Why you?
It’s a valid question. The struggle for racial equality is a long one, seemingly endless. It has required miles of footwork, a deluge of bloodshed, and years of endurance to withstand the ebb and flow of social consciousness, political dysfunction, and surges of white rage. Why would anyone who isn’t tied to the movement by their cultural and sociopolitical identity ever volunteer to join?
My interest in struggles for liberation grew out of my understanding of collective humanity, informed by my Jewish ancestry. Early on in life, I connected far more with the human race than I did a white race. My Jewish grandparents were not considered “white”; neither were their Irish neighbors, although the descendants of these generations were. This informed me that race can be flexible. With near arbitrary parameters, the social construction that is race cannot possibly be an excuse to disengage from the struggle for liberation. So when asked why, my usual response is “Why wouldn’t I?”
This book is my attempt to ensure that the atrocities humans inflict on each other—whether enslavement, genocide, or imprisonment—never fill another museum or warrant another memorial. If you see humanity as a connection to the human race, it is incumbent upon you to speak out against injustice inflicted upon your fellow human. Staying out of the fray will provide shelter for only so long. When they come for you, your justice will be sought by the people you fight for now.
Decisions
My journey into the revolution began when the grassroots organization All of Us or None hired me to write a newspaper amplifying the voices of currently and formerly incarcerated people. The majority of my career had been in journalism, but after covering the criminal legal system as a beat reporter, I felt a need to push for change in a less objective manner.
By May 2020 I had a pretty solid rhythm going with the paper. Every month I’d gather stories from traumatized individuals who had been seen as society’s monsters and treated accordingly. I’d weave their pained statements into dense articles, connecting their present-day tribulations to distant court rulings and political pivots that could provide clues on how to target the next reform and prevent the next injustice. The articles were placed alongside statistical graphics, photographs of the organization’s demonstrations, and intricate drawings made by incarcerated artists with colored pencils, watercolors, and ink pens. I’d pay a couple of editor friends out-of-pocket to put eyes on it, and finally, I’d print out each page on 11 × 17-inch paper to make “proofs”—a publishing term for hardcopy drafts laid out for review before the pages go to press.
Working from home due to the raging pandemic, I was spastically taping the June proofs to the living room wall when I received an alert about George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. The heavy printouts crashed onto the floor as I read about a man crying out for his mother, suffocated because of an untried counterfeit charge.
My husband and my son came into the room, the rustle of papers still settling from the tumble.
“What?” James asked, as our son gleefully wrapped one of the pages around his belly like a gym towel. James began to unwrap him with a gentle “Mommy needs that,” but I quickly interjected.
“No, I don’t. I need to rewrite everything.”
The feature story planned for the June newspaper was about the existence of slavery in the US Constitution—as well as many state constitutions—and the moral and societal consequences of that. In examining the 13th Amendment’s carve-out that preserved slavery—“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime”—I had taken aim at the monetary greed fueling incarceration, explaining how the subsequent forced labor had created a multibillion-dollar-a-year system that lines the pockets of correctional staff and administrators, as well as corporate bigwigs looking to skimp on production costs.
But as I read more about the murder in Minneapolis, about the police officer, Derek Chauvin, who had knelt on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes as he died, it struck me: The persistence of slavery in America could be attributed to something, if possible, even more sinister than greed. The reason why so many Black people are dehumanized by the law is that the men who designed those laws did so in a way that would ensure the people they captured and forced to build this country would never truly be able to call it home. Racism infiltrates law enforcement and criminal legal proceedings because America’s original sins—colonialism, genocide, and slavery—have been solidified and carried forth in the country’s foundational legal documents.
I sat down to rewrite the opening paragraph:
If you’re wondering how a police officer can dig his knee into the neck of a Black man, cut off his oxygen, and murder him on camera . . . the answer is not simply that racism still exists in this country. It is that the original system of racism in this country still exists in a very real and very legal way.1
The following week, the California chapters of All of Us or None had a virtual planning meeting to discuss how we’d demonstrate that instances of police brutality were not one-off anomalies by rogue officers. We wanted to highlight the multigenerational reinforcement of white supremacy that had influenced law enforcement training and protocols and led to this moment. In any other year, the decision would have been easy: Make signs and hit the streets. But there were a couple of problems with this model.
The nation was still grappling with the novel coronavirus, and the idea of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with countless strangers seemed risky. It was a calculated risk that many were still willing to take, but as formerly incarcerated individuals, the membership of All of Us or None was in a particularly high-risk category. Many of them were older, and years of unsanitary conditions, lack of sunlight, and subpar health care had taken their toll.
Simultaneously, the modern movement for civil rights was evolving. Many organizers were beginning to see that traditional ways of protesting had led to negligible gains. My old photojournalism professor, Ken Light, released a book with his wife, Melanie, that summer called Picturing Resistance: Moments and Movements of Social Change from the 1950s to Today; and to be honest, if it wasn’t in chronological order, the movements it depicts would be almost indistinguishable. As you flip through, you begin to realize protests around justice and equality have looked pretty much the same over the last half century: fists raised in 1960s Birmingham, Alabama, and Ferguson, Missouri, in 2015; plumes of smoke blanketing the park outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and covering crowds in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020.
What’s worse is that most of these protests are about the same things: police brutality, disenfranchisement, and racist policies. Demonstrations had created a surplus of moving images, but the reforms enacted in their wake left room for racial injustice to evolve, rather than dissolve. Felony disenfranchisement laws combined with rising numbers of Black individuals being criminalized had undone most of the accomplishments of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite the grotesque images of officers hosing down peaceful protestors at the height of the civil rights movement, the US Supreme Court introduced the qualified immunity doctrine, easing the amount of liability officers face after violent clashes with the public, in 1967 (Pierson v. Ray, 386 US 547). And while not explicitly racist in their terminology, sentencing laws have further served to criminalize and subjugate non-white denizens, as has the advent of “hot-spot policing.”
In an attempt to break the cycle, ideas were beginning to percolate in the 2020s about new ways to rebel and reimagine the fight for racial justice—ideas that took these evolutions into account, and were becoming more strategic as they manifested into plans for social change.
Unfortunately, the Stop Killing Us protest, the demonstration we’d planned, did end up looking very much like previous protests. It featured signs—photographs of 600 men and women killed by police were printed on 20 × 24-inch poster boards. Some classic marching was even supposed to happen, but due to the pandemic and poor planning, not enough people showed up to have each photo elevated. Instead of the signs being held, they were displayed atop the Capitol’s steps in Sacramento, creating a sort of morbid mosaic.
