Life After Life in Prison: The Bedroom Project
February 6 – March 1, 2020
More than 200,000 people in the United States are serving life sentences, a punishment that barely exists in other western countries. I’ve long believed that if judges, prosecutors, and legislators could see people who have been convicted of serious crimes as human beings, they would rethink the policies that lock them away for decades or even sometimes forever.
For the past 9 years, I have been photographing formerly incarcerated women in their bedrooms. All were convicted of serious crimes — mostly homicide — and spent fourteen to thirty-eight years in a maximum-security prison. By the time they came up for parole they were all profoundly changed, yet most of them were repeatedly denied release because of the crimes they had committed decades earlier.
These women were open and trusting enough to allow me into their most private spaces — their bedrooms — and to share the handwritten comments that accompany the photos. Like me, they hope this work will shed light on the pointlessness of extremely long sentences and arbitrary parole denials, and thus help their friends still in prison: women (and men) like them who deserve a chance at freedom.
Sara Bennett, a 2024 Guggenheim fellow, was a criminal appeals attorney in New York City for nearly 20 years. She turned to photography in 2012 as a way to draw attention to the problems of mass incarceration. Her work has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally and is in the collection of, among others, the John Hays Library at Brown University, the Cantor Museum of Arts at Stanford University, and the Museum of the City of New York. She is also the co-author of The Case Against Homework: How Homework is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It (Crown: 2006). She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
With special thanks to our panelists at Saturday’s discussion, bringing to light issues around art, activism, mass incarceration, women in the prison system, and solutions at work. To learn more, to get involved, to support these programs, please visit the following links:
Sara Bennett, Artist, former Public Defender
https://www.lifeafterlifeinprison.com
Mercy Corps NW, Prison & Re-Entry Services
https://www.mercycorpsnw.org/reentry-transition-center/life
YWCA of Greater Portland, Family Preservation Project (FPP)
https://www.ywcapdx.org/what-we-do/family-preservation-project/
Go to this page to see a trailer for “Mothering Inside”
https://www.ywcapdx.org/get-involved/
Open Hearts & Open Minds, Theatre at Coffee Creek
http://openheartsopenminds.net/our-programs/
Oregon Justice Resource Center
https://ojrc.info/
Women’s Justice Project
https://ojrc.info/womens-justice-project
