Sandow Birk, San Quentin State Prison (SQ) – San Quentin, CA, 2000. [Collection of the San Jose Museum of Art, Gift of the Lipman Family Foundation; courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco]
San Quentin State Prison (SQ) – San Quentin, CA Location: North of San Francisco, Marin County
Opened: 1852
Staff: 3710
Design Capacity: 3082
Population: 4101
Budget: $184 million
432 acres
California’s oldest and most infamous prison, San Quentin has the state’s only death row for male prisoners. Currently holding 734 men, it is also the largest death row in the Western hemisphere. From 1996 to 2006, the death penalty has been administered by lethal injection. The practice has been halted as the courts review whether execution protocols constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
[Photo by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation]Sandow Birk, Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP) – Crescent City, CA, 2001.
[Collection of Bill Nichols; courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco]Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP) – Crescent City, CA
Location: Pacific Coast, near the Oregon border
Opened: 1989
Staff: 1521
Design Capacity: 2280
Population: 2861
Budget: $180+ million
275 acres
The X-shaped cluster of white buildings and barren ground is known as the Security Housing Unit, where prisoners initiated hunger strikes in July 2011 to oppose indefinite-term, high-security solitary confinement, where some have been held for decades. The strikes were resumed in July 2013 and joined by 30,000 inmates across the state prison system.
[Photo by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation]Sandow Birk, California Rehabilitation Center (CRC) – Norco, CA, 2000.
[Collection of Pomona College, Claremont, California; funds provided by the Estate of Walter and Elise Mosher]California Rehabilitation Center (CRC) – Norco, CA
Location: Riverside County, east of Los Angeles
Opened: 1962
Staff: 3381
Design Capacity: 2491
Population: 3411
Budget: $148 million
93 acres
This complex includes buildings opened in 1929 as the Lake Norconian Club hotel and resort, a “playground to the stars.” It served as a Navy hospital from 1941 to 1957, became a narcotics treatment center in 1962, and added a medium-security prison for men and women in 1980.
[Photo by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation]Sandow Birk, California State Prison (COR) – Corcoran, CA, 2001.
[Collection of David Klein and Melissa Germaine; courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco]California State Prison (COR) – Corcoran, CA
Location: Kings County, San Joaquin Valley, halfway between Fresno and Bakersfield
Opened: 1988
Staff: 4494
Design Capacity: 3116
Population: 4490
Budget: $274 million
942 acres
Corcoran became notorious in its first decade of operation for alleged inmate abuse by guards, including shootings, beatings and guard-staged “gladiator” fights between prisoners. Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling that California prison overcrowding causes “needless suffering and death,” prisoners here and at 11 other state prisons initiated hunger strikes.
[Photo by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation]Sandow Birk, Folsom State Prison (FSP) – Represa, CA, 2000.
[Collection of Brian Newkirk and Loren Ostrow; courtesy of the artist and Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Los Angeles]Folsom State Prison (FSP) – Represa, CA
Location: Northeast of Sacramento
Opened: 1880
Staff: 1041
Design Capacity: 2469
Population: 2747
Budget: $118 million
40 acres
The second-oldest prison in the state and one of the first maximum-security prisons in the United States, Folsom became known in popular culture for the 1968 Johnny Cash concerts recorded there. Folsom prisoners have labored at the quarry and in the metal shops on the grounds since constructing the prison from stone in the 1870s; since the 1930s, prisoners have manufactured California license plates here.
[Photo by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation]Sandow Birk, California State Prison, Centinela (CEN) – Imperial, CA, 2001.
[Collection of Stephanie and Samuel F. Parker; courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco]California State Prison, Centinela (CEN) – Imperial, CA
Location: Imperial County, near the Mexico border
Opened: 1993
Staff: 1266
Design Capacity: 2308
Population: 2998
Budget: $141 million
2000 acres
Centinela State Prison is named after Cerro Centinela, or Mount Signal, which straddles the U.S. –Mexico border. Four years after opening, in 1997, CEN was the most overcrowded state prison, operating at 259% of design capacity. It has since been overtaken by Avenal State Prison.
[Photo by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation]Sandow Birk, Pleasant Valley State Prison (PVSP) – Coalinga, CA, 2000.
[Courtesy of the artist and Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Los Angeles]Pleasant Valley State Prison (PVSP) – Coalinga, CA
Location: Fresno County
Opened: 1994
Staff: 3558
Design Capacity: 2308
Population: 3577
Budget: $195 million
640 acres
Pleasant Valley and Avenal State Prisons are at the epicenter of the lethal fungal disease known popularly as “Valley Fever” that has swept California’s Central Valley. The imprisoned, especially African Americans, Filipinos, and those with compromised immune systems, are at a 600 times greater risk of contracting the disease than those outside prison walls in Fresno. Prisoners have come to call the disease their “second sentence,” since medical complications can persist for life.
[Photo by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation]Sandow Birk, California Correctional Institution (CCI) – Tehachapi, CA, 2000.
[Collection of Mark Andrus]California Correctional Institution (CCI) – Tehachapi, CA
Location: Kern County, southeast of Bakersfield
Opened: 1933 (reopened 1954)
Staff: 2003
Design Capacity: 2783
Population: 4614
Budget: $168 million
1650 acres
Opened in 1933 as the first state prison for women, it was closed in 1952 and reopened as an all-men’s facility. Today it is one of three prisons in California (including Pelican Bay State Prison and Corcoran State Prison) with Security Housing Units, where those determined by prison authorities to be prison gang members or affiliates are isolated for 22.5 hours a day in 8x10-foot, usually windowless cells.
[Photo by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation]Sandow Birk, Salinas Valley State Prison (SVSP) – Soledad, CA, 2001.
[Collection of Peter and Beverly Lipman; courtesy of the artist and Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Los Angeles]Salinas Valley State Prison (SVSP) – Soledad, CA
Location: Monterey County
Opened: 1996
Staff: 3484
Design Capacity: 2452
Population: 3571
Budget: $183 million
300 acres
Located a few miles north of the Soledad Mission, Salinas Valley State Prison is best known for the prison uprising and subsequent trials of the “Soledad Brothers” — George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgoole and John Clutchette — charged with murdering prison guard John Mills in 1970. Jackson was killed in San Quentin on August 21, 1971, three days before the start of the murder trial and two weeks after his 17-year old brother, Jonathan Jackson, was killed in a takeover of a Marin County courthouse, demanding the prisoners’ release. Jackson’s book, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, remains a classic in prison literature and political philosophy.
[Photo by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation]Alyse Emdur, Backdrop painted by Darrell Van Mastrigt in State Correctional Institution, Graterford, Pennsylvania, 2012.
[Courtesy of the artist]Alyse Emdur, Anonymous backdrop painted in Woodbourne State Correctional Facility, New York, 2012 .
[Courtesy of the artist]Alyse Emdur, Anonymous backdrop painted in Otisville Correctional Facility, New York, 2012 .
[Courtesy of the artist]Lynette Newson, Correctional Institute for Women, Corona, California; and Antoine Ealy, Federal Correctional Complex, Coleman, Florida. From Alyse Emdur, Prison Landscapes, 2012.
[Courtesy of the artist]Daniel Ascencio, Pelican Bay State Prison, Crescent City, California; and Monique Ramirez, Valley State Prison for Women, Chowchilla, California. From Alyse Emdur, Prison Landscapes, 2012.
[Courtesy of the artist]Victoria Williams, Valley State Prison for Women, Chowchilla, California; and Clemeth Castille, California State Prison Sacramento, Represa, California. From Alyse Emdur, Prison Landscapes, 2012.
[Courtesy of the artist]Remi Emdur, Bruce Emdur, and the artist (at age five, right), Bayside State Prison, Leesburg, New Jersey, 1988. From Alyse Emdur, Prison Landscapes, 2012.
[Courtesy of the artist]Richard Ross, Holding cells, Joint Task Force, Guantánamo, Cuba, 2005.
[Courtesy of the artist]Richard Ross, Segregation cells, Camp Remembrance, new Abu Ghraib prison, Abu Ghraib, Iraq, 2005.
The detainee compound at Abu Ghraib opened in 2005. It was named Camp Remembrance in honor of the police officers and firefighters who perished in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Open to the elements, prisoners in these segregation cells were to be checked every 15 minutes as temperatures often reached triple digits.
[Courtesy of the artist]Richard Ross, Interrogation room, Delta Camp V, Guantánamo, Cuba, 2005.
Designed and built to be a permanent detention facility at the U.S. Naval Base, Camp V opened in 2004 to hold what the Pentagon has termed “non-compliant” detainees in isolation units modeled on a maximum-security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
[Courtesy of the artist]Richard Ross, Interview room, Secret Service headquarters, Los Angeles, 2006.
[Courtesy of the artist]Richard Ross, Booking bench, Los Angeles Police Department, Fifth and Wall Street station, 2006.
[Courtesy of the artist]Richard Ross, Abandoned shower stalls, Camp X-Ray, Guantánamo, Cuba, 2005.
Initially constructed in 1994 for accused criminals among Haitian refugees detained at Guantánamo, Camp X-Ray was closed in 1996 after protests and a protracted legal battle. It reopened in January 2002 to house the first “enemy combatants” from the war on terror. Detainees were brought to Guantánamo because it was determined to be a legal void in which the U.S. could operate with impunity. Camp X-Ray was closed again in April 2002 in the face of international controversy over allegations of torture, its remaining 300 prisoners transferred to Camp Delta.
[Courtesy of the artist]Richard Ross, Arrow pointing to Mecca, exercise yard, Camp 3, Guantánamo, Cuba, 2005.
[Courtesy of the artist]
An archipelago of U.S. prisons stretches from Guantánamo Bay to California’s “Golden Gulag,” and this summer those facilities are in a heightened state of crisis. The hunger strike at the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, now enters its sixth month. Meanwhile, California Governor Jerry Brown is fighting federal court orders to reduce the state’s prison population. And this week, inmates in California state prisons resumed hunger strikes initiated in 2011 by detainees in indefinite solitary confinement — some for over three decades.
In this context, the works presented here — paintings by Sandow Birk, photographs by Alyse Emdur and Richard Ross, and first-person narratives from the Guantánamo Public Memory Project — take on new urgency.
Sandow Birk redeploys iconic 19th-century American and European landscapes to depict a new Manifest Destiny. Each work is a portrait of a single California state prison, from Pelican Bay at the Oregon border to Centinela State Prison at the Mexico border. Inspired by Albert Bierstadt’s Western fantasia and Henry Cheever Pratt’s speculative gaze, Prisonation (2000-2001) wryly comments on California’s role in national imaginations of utopian pasts and dystopic futures. The open spaces, desert plains and mountainous backdrops of Birk’s paintings collide with mundane details of contemporary life — roadside signs, lawn sprinklers, airplane exhaust juxtaposed with a bird’s flight — before revealing, in the distance, the fences, towers and distinctive configurations of the prison compound. The paintings underscore how U.S. prisons operate at the edge of visual consciousness, outside the purview of the urban-suburban middle class, at the crossroads of industrial agriculture and rural poverty. They are interspersed with recent aerial views of the same sites by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation alongside details of the facilities’ construction and operation.
Alyse Emdur’s installation Prison Landscapes highlights the little-known phenomenon of prisoners posing in front of painted mural backdrops in visiting rooms, representing themselves for (and sometimes with) family and friends. In Emdur’s hands, this routine ritual — the prison-industrial “portrait studio” — opens onto affective cartographies of escape, ambivalence, reunion and agency, and becomes a collective portrait of the nation’s incarcerated. Her work breaks the fourth wall by calling out its framing devices. Large-format photographs of visiting rooms show the murals in their context of institutional architecture, security cameras and barred windows. Displayed alongside prisoners’ letters and photographs sent to the artist over the years, these works encourage viewers to critique the genres of portraiture, testimony and documentary. Prison Landscapes asks audiences to reconsider the divide between the observer and the observed. Emdur began the project after discovering a Polaroid of her 5-year-old self next to her incarcerated brother, and she pans back as much as she zooms in, questioning notions of “inside” and “outside.” Her work ultimately yields a call for connection across the bars.
Photographer Richard Ross was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 to explore built forms of incarceration. His series Architecture of Authority presents beautiful photographs of intolerable places, revealing the spatial logic used to exert power over prisoners, the symmetry of subjection. There are no soft edges in Ross’s work. His compositions evoke the rectangular forms of cages even when they are not literally depicted. The rooms, hallways and exterior spaces are emptied of people but represented at a scale that forces viewers to renegotiate their relationship to the scene. His deep-focus narrowing of detention room walls suggests a human gaze; here the painterly technology of perspective is pulled to an ideological vanishing point. From heavily mediated spaces, like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, to relatively invisible spaces, like a booking room in downtown Los Angeles, the cages, chairs and shackles have a kind of sameness that collapses difference and connects disparate forms of coercion and capture. Ross’s hyper-aestheticized vision is a dare to keep looking, but neither as a documentary indulgence nor as a philosophical mandate to stare into the face of the other. Rather, he queries us about why we look and why we look away.
The Guantánamo Public Memory Project combines historical and contemporary photography, film and first-person audio interviews in a website and traveling exhibit that examines the naval base’s long historical arc, from its establishment after the 1898 Spanish-American War, through its use as a holding center for Haitian and Cuban refugees in the 1990s, to its current function as a prison for “enemy combatants.” These new perspectives on Guantánamo’s history as a legal black hole provoke discussions about the limits of democracy and the meaning of mass incarceration.
Together, these works address emotional terrains, carceral landscapes and geopolitical formations that connect the growth of the prison industrial complex to patterns of empire. Recognizable artistic traditions — landscape, portrait, architectural photograph, documentary — are here politicized.
Whither Guantánamo?
On his second day in office, President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center within the year, despite Congressional opposition from both parties. Now, four years later, and 11 years since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. naval base, Gitmo is still open. By classifying the prisoners as “enemy combatants” rather than prisoners of war, the George W. Bush Administration aimed to evade the federal War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions. A 2008 Supreme Court ruling granted detainees the constitutional right to challenge their indefinite detention in federal court; but the vast majority have never been charged. Of 799 prisoners, 625 were returned to the countries where they were arrested, and 8 died in prison, 6 by suicide; 166 remain, of whom 86 have been cleared for release. A few face trials before military commissions, and others are subject to active investigations and could be tried in either civil or military courts. Congress, however, has refused either to fund civil trials or to house detainees in stateside prisons.
The Guantánamo hunger strike that began in February 2013 now includes some 100 prisoners, including more than 40 who are being force-fed, a practice condemned by human rights organizations and the American Medical Association. At a recent press conference, President Obama reiterated his stance that Guantánamo must be closed. His conviction, however, rang less true than his inadvertently desperate question: “Why are we doing this?”
California in Crisis
A similar question might be asked of the U.S. prison system. The United States has the largest prison population in the world — 2.3 million, of whom 70 percent are people of color. In 2010, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that overcrowding in California state prisons prevents minimally humane medical and mental health care and that these conditions amount to “cruel and unusual punishment.” The suicide rate among state prisoners is nearly twice the national average, and one inmate dies every eight days from inadequate medical care. As yet, the state has not fulfilled federal mandates to reduce overcrowding, and Governor Brown has stated that he will appeal the Circuit Court ruling to the Supreme Court.
United Nations reports have cited U.S. violations of the Geneva Conventions in the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. They similarly decry the widespread use of solitary confinement, extreme temperatures and physical and emotional abuse in U.S. prisons and immigrant detention centers. Activists, the incarcerated and artists are working to abolish this system and grapple creatively with this ongoing crisis.
Comments are closed. If you would like to share your thoughts about this article, or anything else on Places Journal, visit our Facebook page or send us a message on Twitter.