After spending 18 years as a public defender, SARA BENNETT turned her attention to photographing women with life sentences, both inside and outside prison. Her work has been widely exhibited in solo shows, including at the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, OR, and in group shows, including MoMA PS1’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Her work has been featured in such publications as The New York Times, The New Yorker Photo Booth, and Variety & Rolling Stone’s “American (In)Justice.”
Someone’s Daughters
Evelyn
“The day before I turned 37 in 2012, I was released from prison after serving 17 years. It felt a little challenging. I went to prison in dinosaur times—a beeper, no cellphones—and in prison I didn’t have any access to the internet. But at the same time, I also felt confident because in prison I always kept myself busy—reading, keeping up with what was new, doing every job that came my way, learning English. I knew if I kept busy I wouldn’t sink into depression. I played sports, sang in a choir, shoveled snow, worked in the kitchen, basically said “yes” to everything.
When I came home, I went straight into a program run by an organization called Hour Children. I had volunteered for their summer program in prison and so they provided me with housing and also helped me get a grant so I could get more culinary training. Since I was little, I always loved to cook. I worked my way up from line cook and now I’ve been an executive chef for the same company for four years. Because of the circumstances of the pandemic, I have a second job, also as an executive chef. A few years ago, I designed a meaningful tattoo, honoring myself as a chef.
Since I got home, I’ve lived in 7 places. At first it was rooms in transitional housing, then my own apartment. Now I live with my wife of 3 years. My wife gave me a Shih Tsu and, like a typical normal family, we have grown bigger and now we have three dogs. When the immigration approval comes through, we will also have her three children with us. They’re in Central America.
If I could change anything in the system, I would reevaluate sentences. Some people are sitting there because they’re innocent; some are there because they lost their minds and couldn’t get help; some were just lost. I would like everyone to have a chance at life on the outside. I would be way more lenient with sentences.
BIO: After serving 17 years in prison, EVELYN came home 9 years ago. She currently works as an executive chef and lives with her wife and 3 dogs in Queens, NY.
Mahogany L Browne
Mahogany is the Executive Director of JustMedia, a media literacy initiative designed to support the groundwork of criminal justice leaders and community members. This position is informed by her career as a writer, organizer and educator. Browne has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research & Rauschenberg. She is the author of recent works: Chlorine Sky, Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby, & Black Girl Magic. As the founder of the diverse lit initiative, Woke Baby Book Fair. Browne’s latest project is a poetry collection responding to the impact of mass incarceration on women and children: I Remember Death By Its Proximity to What I Love (Haymarket Books), She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Karen
After spending 34.5 years in prison, KAREN landed in New York City where she works as a residential aide in the Women’s Prison Association shelter and helps other women who are disenfranchised. She creates fabric art wall hangings, “Yearnscapes,” which have been exhibited, among others, in a solo show at the WOW Cafe in New York City’s East Village.
Nicole R. Fleetwood
She is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history, and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in
art criticism. She is also curator of the exhibition Marking Time at MoMA PS1. Her other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011). She is also co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue, focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration, and co-curator of Aperture’s touring exhibition of the same name. Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions and programs on art and mass incarceration at the Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture Foundation, Cleveland Public.