Inside Looking Out

A portfolio of life within the unforgiving walls

To observers on the outside, the ' I ' purpose of prisons is to keep criminals on the inside. To the inmates themselves, prisons are for other things: to kill time; to learn, perhaps; above all, to wait. Life behind walls may be harsh and occasionally dangerous, but it is primarily boring--the undemarcated succession of hours in which the dreariest routines must either be given some importance, however contrived, or be ignored entirely through an effort of will or imagination. Many inmates conclude that the experience of prison makes someone other, and worse, than himself. Perhaps. Surely it makes one different for the time he spends in prison. For a year or two or 20, life consists solely of repeated details, the slamming of gates, and constant, fathomless solitude.

The following photographs offer views from the inside of seven maximum-security prisons. With the exception of Leavenworth, all are state institutions. Most of these places are famous in American folklore and in grim modern history. Their names evoke images of riots in the yards, of searchlights and sirens, of tin cups banged in unison on the tables of gothic mess halls. The normal reality of prison life is, of course, calmer, but no less extraordinary. These are societies made up largely of people who have robbed, attacked and murdered other people, after all, and of those who oversee them. No world they compose could be anything but bizarre.

The odd thing to contemplate is that these bizarre constructions are the handiwork of the society to which they stand as outcasts. Monstrous as they may appear, they belong to the recognizable world of a civilization's institutions, just as the men and women they house, no matter what they have done, belong to the world of those they violated. These people are presented here, flat against the page, as if they were separated entirely from those who observe them. But it is chastening to realize that the life they lead is no less real to them than life on the outside, nor is their world less human for being locked away.

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