Teaching Photography at San Quentin State Prison

An Interview with Pete Brook, by Kate Palmer Albers

Pete Brook is a writer and curator focused on photography, prisons, and power. I first heard him speak about his work in 2014 during his talk at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s symposium “Bearing Witness”. Since then, I’ve learned more, through his exhibition Prison Obscura (2014–2016) and his website Prison Photography, which has featured the photographs of Isadora Kosofsky and Jacobia Dahm, both mentioned in the conversation below. I was particularly interested to learn about his recent foray into teaching, under the auspices of The Prison University Project at San Quentin Prison in northern California’s Marin County. I asked him to talk with me about teaching the history of photography in this unique environment.

Jacobia Dahm, from the series The Prison Buses, 2013–2014. Candis is holding one of the precious prison polaroids, the only pictures people have of their loved ones on the inside. This picture is showing herself with her husband John and her daughter Camryn. March 26, 2014. Image courtesy of Jacobia Dahm/REDUX

Kate Palmer Albers: You’ve taught the history of photography at San Quentin, a couple of times now, yes?

Pete Brook: It was History of Photography the first semester; a chronological look at the medium and its practitioners. Then, in a second semester, I did a workshop with eight guys in which we wrote a curriculum about mass incarceration, using images as the entry point for each of the five lesson plans that we put together.

KPA: How did it come about that you joined the faculty?

PB: I approached The Prison University Project (PUP) about a class on prison photography. I knew that I would need to teach in an existing prison education program, because I knew the value of the support and admin and access that goes with that. I wanted to pitch at a college level. The Prison University Project is a college program that is well known — it’s been going since the late nineties — and so I asked them if they had a desire to help me do this class. They needed history of photography teaching but had no use for a pure prison photography course that I’d conceive of. PUP could see a scenario in which I taught a general history of photo class and tie in the prison photo stuff. I then went away secured some grant money in order to live in the Bay Area for nine months; all the instructors at the Prison University Project are volunteer.

KPA: You had taught photo history before? In a general way?

PB: Yes, at Sacramento State. Spring semester 2018.

KPA: I’m very interested in how one approaches the history of photography as a general survey class, and, in particular, how you structured it for the class at San Quentin, this situation and this set of students. And I also want to talk about something I know we both think about: how images circulate and function in our daily lives today, now, in 2019, and what happens in the obviously very different environment for images and photography inside a prison. I want to get to the photographic experience in San Quentin, as it plays out on a daily basis. But first, how did you structure the class?

PB: I called it the History of Photography + Power. We started in 1839 and brought it through to the internet, facial recognition, and other state surveillances.

KPA: What were the parameters that you had to keep in mind coming up with the content?

Isadora Kosofsky, from the series Still My Mother, Still My Father. Melody extends her arm to her mother, Tamaya, who caresses her fingers during a visit at the Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala, Florida. Image courtesy of the artist.

PB: Well, I came up with a framing for them that we returned to again and again. I told them that whenever they encountered an image, even if they thought they were totally at sea, and they didn’t know what was going on, I asked them to consider three agents. I said, “Sit with an image and think about what it’s like to be the person in the image. Think about what it’s like to be the person making the image. And think about what it’s like to be someone outside of the image, the audience.”

And that was always our safety net, our default to which we could return if we were struggling to pick something apart or understand it. There was no overarching framework other than to say there is always power involved with an image, whether it is a really well-meaning portrait artist like Alessandra Sanguinetti (whose pictures of the two young girls in Argentina who play make believe, the men really liked). Or whether it’s August Sander, who is making a political point in a time when making a political point was quite fraught. Or whether it’s a faceless, nameless networked system. That was something we could always return to: who or what has the power? What power is served with this image? And you start to find answers to that based upon what you think the subject, the photographer, and the audience has in relationship to the image.

KPA: Did you have a goal or a set of goals when you started the class, for either you or the students?

PB: Yes. I wanted them to understand that photography isn’t just a neutral thing that stands on the sidelines of history and documents it. Photography makes a society, and therefore makes history. At week five or six, we read John Tagg, who says essentially this in his essay “Evidence, Truth and Order: Photographic Records and the Growth of the State.”

Often, as with any students, they wanted to think about an image as they would a painting or a piece of music, something that has been created by an artistic hand, which then leaves it up to us to learn how to appreciate it. But I was very keen to take photography away from only the considerations of art and say, no, photography has made society. For instance, we talked about the mugshot in 1870s Paris and London.

KPA: How did that conversation go in class?

PB: Pretty well. Again, it’s John Tagg; he describes how the modern takes hold in society. It creates new public state institutions — public transport, public education, public sanitation, department of public works, public radio. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was this push for the establishment of institutions, right? That in its attempt to, yes, bring education and sanitation, but the government also brought large state bureaucracies which managed all aspects of modern life in terms of health, hygiene, law, etc. All this was directly related to the nation state, anything that was public was belonged to the nation, belonged to the people. But sometimes those institutions ended up not serving the people in a purely democratic sense, and rather, created a new concentration of power for the state. So the students could understand that very easily when you talked about police. But I wasn’t there to cop bash, I was there to put this in historical terms, and introduce how all of that institution-building was based upon records, measurements, and taxes. And part of that record keeping was photography.

Jacobia Dahm, from the series The Prison Buses, 2013–2014. Candis, 31, and her daughter Camryn, 1, on the way home from visiting John, Camryn’s father, at the Wyoming Correctional facility on this day trip. Camryn was conceived during a so called “trailer” visit, one of the weekend visits that exist at many maximum security prisons. March 15, 2014. Image courtesy of Jacobia Dahm/REDUX

KPA: Right. In terms of the basic classroom set up, what did the teaching look like?

PB: I started with 28 students. Two guys got out. I finished with 26.

KPA: Is there a textbook? A way to project images?

PB: There was a class reader. About 20 readings — bell hooks, Susan Sontag, Martha Rosler, Trevor Paglen, Tod Papageorge, John Szarkowski, John Berger, Bill Jay, Agnes Martin, Dave Hickey, to name a few.

As for images, there was no projection … or computers, or flash drives … in the facility. I made a handout of the images that we were talking about for that day. I try to boil my lectures down to twelve or sixteen images, which is a pain because I really like to show a lot of images. And then I would print out 26 copies, double-sided, in color.

KPA: Wow.

PB: Yeah, the reproductions were not always the best. It was the one thing really that needed to be improved, but there is no real way you could improve it greatly other than burning all of your lectures on to DVDs and then showing them on a TV. But burning things to DVDs is quite tricky these days.

KPA: Yeah, it’s a sort of outdated technology, right?

PB: DVD Burner used to be included in the standard Apple iOS suite. Not any more.

KPA: So there is a text reader, and then these weekly image booklets that you make. And, if you are in prison, what other images are you looking at during the day? What kind of images are available, to look at?

PB: You will be looking at a lot of signage, a lot of instructions. The library is large (I’ve seen pictures) but I don’t know what its offering of art books are. Magazines are a key source of visual materials for prisoners generally. Men will be looking at the San Quentin Newspaper too.

KPA: Published and printed in house, yes?

PB: Yeah. You can subscribe, we all can. People on the outside can get it. That is particular to San Quentin though. Very few prisons have their own newspaper.

The majority of the men have hard copies of their own family photographs. Some people have huge binders of years and years of photographs that have been sent from the outside. There’s going to be some cellphone use going on.

Isadora Kosofsky, from the series Still My Mother, Still My Father. Annamarie stands as her daughter, Melody, age 14, embraces her during a visit at the Homestead Correctional Institution in Florida City, Florida. “It’s hard to mother from in here,” says Annamarie. Melody and her sister, Tiffany, age 22, see their mother 4 times a year through the Children of Inmates program, which buses them to and from the city. “To hear things but not be a part of it. My youngest is starting high school. I’m missing out. At least I’m leaving here,” says Anna. Anna has been incarcerated for robbery for 5 years. After not checking in for parole one time, she was given another 5-year sentence. Tiffany remarks, “I was afraid my son doesn’t even know her. My mom tells me you have to come more. He’s scared. She missed a lot for me. I didn’t have a female role model. I don’t talk about it to people. To my coworkers. They don’t know my situation. One coworker told me that I should invite my mom to my baby shower. I had to tell her that my mom lived too far to come.” Image courtesy of the artist.

KPA: What is the cellphone rule?

PB: Cellphone use is illegal. A cellphone is contraband. They are not allowed.

KPA: What are the rules around photographs, or visual images?

PB: It differs depending on what state you are in, what prison you are in, and what place you are in. It used to be in California that some solitary confinement units banned all photographs, and only allowed letter writing material. That changed a few years ago.

In San Quentin, because it’s a prison nowadays with a relatively stable population, I think you probably are allowed to own as many photographs as you wish. As long as you don’t piss off your cellie by having them littering the cell, you’re fine.

KPA: Did you talk about that in the class at all, what kinds of pictures people had? Personal photographs?

PB: I mentioned it. And we talked about how prison was a different environment to the outside. Everyone on the outside has cellphones where they can make and share and discard at will, but in prison they don’t have cellphones. Well, some prisoners do have cellphones, but we didn’t talk about that.

KPA: One of the reasons I am asking about this is because in my photo history classes, especially at the intro level, when I start to talk about family snapshots or printed images, and their experience of those printed images versus the rest of the images that they see in the world, oftentimes students have a kind of a revelation about the quality of printed photographs: what they mean and how they’re different. Since prison represents such a radically different image environment overall I am curious about how much the men you worked with thought about or processed those same kinds of comparisons, either in the context of your class, or just generally.

PB: I don’t know this for sure, but it was my impression that they were either reluctant or hesitant to talk about their own photographs. It’s a guess as to why that was the case. I think for some of them, they’ve never thought about their photographs in a continuum of human experience with images. And didn’t think that their photographs made in the visiting room, or the snaps that their daughter or parents had sent them, warranted discussion in that same way.

They wanted to see stunning images by famed artists. It makes sense; education for them was an opportunity to travel beyond the walls. Their isolation and invisibility makes their lives fascinating to us … BUT their isolation from society means to them (often) tedium and limitation. They had a thirst for the beyond. Sometimes it is hard to talk about what is close.

And then the other reason, which I have to assume is the case, is that I think they just wanted their privacy to which they have every right. Their privacy is compromised all the time by the daily system as it operates. To talk about their own pictures is to open up about a thing that is very precious to them.

When it came to talking about the San Quentin Newspaper, some of the more vocal and critical students thought: “Every picture in that newspaper is not real life, it’s all just celebrating happy events.” I am paraphrasing. Of course, we do have many happy events in San Quentin to mark — graduations, work milestones, performances, guest speakers, sports events — but there are other parts of prison life, the harder and harsher realities, which just aren’t going to get talked about in a prison newspaper so those images don’t make it in.

I had one guy in my class who has since got out, and who was one of the two or three photographers with the paper. He was inside for fourteen years, a lovely guy. In my second semester, the editor of the newspaper was in the class and he told us about the process of getting photographs printed in the prison newspaper. It’s a process of censorship essentially, but a more involved process of censorship than I thought. There are multiple steps of reserving the camera, getting administration approval to use it at this specific hour on this day for this event. Afterward, the newspaper editors file images it wants to use. It already knows what the administration will approve or not, so there’s self-censorship before the authority casts its eye over the images.

KPA: Let’s talk more about all of that: the photographer in the class, the editor, the students’ critical reception. But first will you describe the newspaper?

PB: The paper (San Quentin News) is monthly. You can find it online. You can subscribe, you can have it delivered to your house if you want. It is probably 24 pages. The February issue this year had an amazing centerfold double spread for Valentine’s Day of prisoner visiting room portraits with this flower background. I thought it was great. Most of my students were like, “No, it’s schmaltzy. Whatever. Meh.”

KPA: What did you think was great about it?

PB: That they were celebrating the one type of imagery that they do have free access to, and can share. Now, of course, there’s qualifications to that, like: Why is that the dominant imagery they have and that they are allowed to have routinely?

KPA: Did you have the sense that the students already felt that the newspaper was an inadequate visual representation of their experience, or did that come out over the course of conversations in this specific class about power and photography?

PB: Yeah. But the criticism is that, with the exception of the sport events which is like a game report or a match report, or people from the Golden State Warriors coming to the prison to visit or play a pick-up game, most of the photographs are group portraits of handshakes and smiles and people holding certificates or diplomas. And all of the prisoners are in blue uniform and everyone else — administrators, civilians, family, volunteers — are not wearing the blue uniforms. All of the photographs are taken either in the yard or in the education building or in the chapel. But there’s no roving photographer taking pictures in all corners of the prison.

Jacobia Dahm, from the series The Prison Buses, 2013–2014. The prison buses pick up passengers in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. Visitors need to reserve well in advance to get a good seat or make it onto the more comfortable buses at all instead of the much smaller mini vans. A bus ride costs $65 per adult and $30 per child, a substantial sum for families, many of whom struggle to make ends meet and are effectively single-parent households. Image courtesy of Jacobia Dahm/REDUX

With 2.3 million people in prison the United States has the largest prison population in the world. An estimated 2.7 million American children have a parent in prison. Every Friday and Saturday night hundreds of New Yorkers, mostly women, many with children, undertake 24-hour trips and get on private buses and mini vans to drive all night in order to spend a few hours the next day with their husbands, brothers, mothers and fathers, who have been placed in prisons hundreds of miles from the city. March 7, 2014.

I did, though, manage to pop into the San Quentin News newsroom, and they took a hard drive out of a locked cabinet because I said I had an interest in prison photographs. I asked, “What do the archives of this newspaper look like?” So I was able to flick through, and they had more variation.

KPA: Because there were photographs that were made and not allowed to be published, but they are still stored on the hard drive?

PB: Yeah, in some cases. And then some stuff just gets through. Like there was a folder of images from the kitchen in the mess hall, and it was just a few guys in the morning working and chopping vegetables and getting things set up.

KPA: Daily life.

PB: Those images spoke to the labor that is done by prisoners in this old, old kitchen. And the daily operations just to keep the facility going. That felt new to me. So, my assumption is that it would be new to other people, to just see what it looks like behind the scenes running a prison kitchen for thousands of men. It’s not new to anyone who lives and works there though.

KPA: Do you think your students would enjoy even the imaginative exercise of what a good photographic representation of prison would look like?

PB: We did it.

KPA: I definitely want to hear more about that. This was a planned assignment, or you said, “Hey, I hear your criticism of the paper, what do you think should be in it, instead?”

Isadora Kosofsky, from the series Still My Mother, Still My Father. Carlos holds his son, Damian, during a visit at the Everglades Reentry Center; Carlos hopes to become a counselor upon release and work beside his wife who is a drug detox clinician. Image courtesy of the artist.

PB: It was in the context of appreciating that the prison was locked down in terms of its visual culture, and that the administration ultimately has power. The students know that the types of prison images in film and TV particularly are skewed… and they know they don’t necessarily benefit from those skewed representations. And that even the prison newspaper has this process of censorship.

They’re not griping, nor complaining, but they see the visual culture for what it is. And so while we were writing the workshop curriculum I said, okay, we’re going to ask these high school students on the outside what they think prison looks like. And then after that exercise they are going to share short pieces by you where you write about an image from inside prison, that you know or can assume has not been photographed, but that you have seen, you have witnessed, and you would like to share.

KPA: This must be inspired by Mark Strandquist, whose work you featured in Prison Obscura.

PB: Oh yeah. I mean, inasmuch as that’s a really good approach to take if you’re interested in social practice and stories. There are a lot of groups in society to whom you can give cameras, and you can brainstorm pictures with, and then you can invite them to go out and make them. In prison you can brainstorm the pictures knowing that you’re never going to make them. And the double whammy there is that even if you did take them you know that they’re not getting out.

Jacobia Dahm, from the series The Prison Buses, 2013–2014. Jeremiah, 2, asleep as the bus is passing Attica prison in the early morning hours. Jeremiah is on his way to see his mother at Albion Correctional Facility. Albion is the largest women’s prison in NY state, 20 miles from the Canadian Border. Jeremiah lives in the Bronx with his grandmother. March 8, 2014. Image courtesy of Jacobia Dahm/REDUX

KPA: Right, double invisibility.

PB: Yeah. I had one student who was insistent that you would have to spend a day in the life and photograph every part of the prison. So that would be the Reception Center, West Block, North Block, the solitary confinement facility, the prison factory, the fire house, the prison hospital, the education buildings, the gardens, the yard, the maintenance buildings, the chapel, the clerks’ offices, the library. He was like, “Just do a massive survey. Make the point that this is one institution and one day.” And really try to describe the breadth of experience.

KPA: It’s like all of those day in the life projects, right? A group of 50 photographers across the US on April 11th, or whatever, and everyone photographs.

PB: Exactly, getting all Rick Smolan on it. Perhaps Smolan could do a workshop with the California Department of Corrections?!

I had another student who just described an image of his current self as compared with an image from his memory: “The first image is me watching a guy get stabbed to death outside of my cell as a 19-year-old. The second image is me in a classroom, brainstorming a curriculum to help teenagers understand the prison system, aged 32.”

KPA: Bookends. Then and now, before and after.

PB: From where he was thirteen years ago to where he was today.

I had one student who insisted all he could do would be to install thousands upon thousands of cameras that were recording 24 hours a day to the point that everyone should assume that they are being filmed all the time, prisoners AND staff. But then get to the point where they forget they’re being filmed, and that any member of the public, at any time, can go online and watch the feed from any camera they want. He said, “That’s the only way that the public will understand what is going on inside and where their tax dollars go.”

KPA: That’s remarkable. Did he reflect on what the effect of that total surveillance and total transparency might be?

PB: He felt it would make for public outrage potentially, but he wasn’t expecting that, because when we talked about it the guys were confused as to why there wasn’t public outrage decades ago. They just assumed that a lot of Americans know what goes on in their prisons and they just don’t care. Whether that is accurate or not ends up not mattering. Because not enough people on the outside are agitating for the system to change.

But more than anything, and this was consistent with a lot of the guys’ attitudes, there needed to be a check on staff abuses — abuses of the rules, abuses of power — and for there to be checks and accountability. They weren’t talking solely about San Quentin, nor suggesting San Quentin had specific problems. To the contrary, San Quentin was a lot more stabilized than a lot of the 32 other California prisons.

I am very wary about what I am saying on record here but I don’t think it is a mischaracterization to say that in the cumulative 600+ years that my students had spent behind bars, they’d experienced tensions between prisoners and staff. And those tensions are exacerbated by shit talk, and some correctional officers choose to shit talk and that doesn’t help maintain standards or dignity. Some officers are good, and then some officers are not. Just as some prisoners are good, and some prisoners are not. But if it comes down to a “I said, he said,” no one is listening to the prisoner. So I think my student thought that if there was a constant surveillance, it would be this third testimony, which would break you out of that eternal frustration of knowing that you have no power. Just think… and this is a hypothetical for any prison, not San Quentin… if someone on staff purposefully or accidentally steals your shit, injures you, conspires against you, whatever the wrong or the harm is, currently it’s the prisoner’s word against theirs and the prisoner’s word 99 times out of a hundred counts for nothing. My student could envision a constant surveillance and describe its application as a check on power and as a third “witness”.

Image courtesy of Isadora Kosofsky

KPA: In class, you were talking about the structural elements of mass incarceration and the effects of it on the populations. To have that conversation is not neutral, obviously.

PB: No, but I was in San Quentin as a teacher and a workshop leader. I did not hide my politics; honesty and one’s word is very important always and especially inside prison. Prisoners, especially those at San Quentin who interact with many civilians are wary of people entering the prison with radical politics to push. The men require and deserve professional engagement in all things, especially in education. PUP makes sure its teachers follow curriculum not their personal agendas. PUP has done this well; their presence for 20 years attests to that.

So, I never told the men how to think; I showed them how to look at things, and always ALWAYS tried to deliver broader context. Teaching history of photo is like teaching history; you wanna talk about Gilles Peress? You’re gonna have to talk about 200 years of Balkan history.

I could lean on the work of others. I’d show them bodies of work of prison photographs or photographs that speak to the issue.

KPA: That’s exactly what I’m wondering: how much you brought in to the curriculum, from the artists and photographers you’ve featured in Prison Photography.

PB: The final paper was to have them write on prison photographs. They had to do three things:

1. to put the issue that the photograph spoke to in context; to do the research, find out the stats, see how California compared to other states, see how other states compared to national levels, all of that. Do a proper bang up research job.

2. to analyze the images.

3. to insert their own personal narrative or personal experience.

KPA: And their subject was one artist’s work, one person who had dealt with the topic of prisons. How did that assignment go?

PB: I think the essays are great. Some of them I will edit and keep them as they are, some of them I will pluck out the best 400 words. The next step is to publish them.

KPA: Who were the photographers and which work of prisons particularly resonated with your students?

PB: Isadora Kosofsky and Jacobia Dahm both of whom did series on family visitation.

KPA: You’ve done a tremendous amount of work with artists, a lot of speaking and writing on the topic of photography and prisons. How does this teaching experience affect your perspective, your priorities, your interests, what you know and understand about that work? Recognizing that it’s a work in progress, that you still have publishing your students’ work ahead of you.

PB: Yes. But in terms of just being in the classroom with these guys, it felt and operated in a way that I anticipated it would. So, it felt good.

I really wanted to go back to teaching, and it felt relevant, and it felt needed. It’s more compelling than writing about the issue certainly. The guys got college credit, that’s what they were there for primarily, before anything else. I feel like I’ve served them in that respect. Now, to get the published writings out will just double the effect. And really honor them because there’s a lot of stuff that they do on the inside, and there’s a lot of hassle to translate it to the outside for an outside public. The experience confirmed what I thought and hoped with the proposal, in teaching history of photography.

KPA: Which was?

PB: Which was to have them think about power, and have them think about photographs as not neutral objects or neutral agents, but as being part of a complex that creates a society. I’ll end with this story. I showed them pictures from the Victorian era — photographs made of infants who had died. And in some cases, parents would prop up their dead baby next to their three older siblings. This particularly interested one student. His brother had been shot dead. His son had been shot dead. He had been to countless funerals throughout his life before he even started his incarceration, which had been going on for 24 years. But he said whenever he went to a funeral it was always his mom or his aunts who were taking pictures of the corpse in the open casket. And he always dismissed it, thought it was a weird behavior, just a stupid thing that your mom does. But then when he saw these Victorian portraits he got to wondering why it was always the women in his family who were making photographs at funerals, and why it was never important to him.

He concluded, that it was women who were the caretakers, and that one might need more of an emotional reckoning with one’s self in order to take those images. He thought the women in his family wanted mementos but could also have been thinking longer term, forward and back, about what ancestry and family is, and how that continues to exist. He wrote a really beautiful essay. He telephoned his mom and his sister, and he included quotes from them about why they took those photographs. So that was a really proud moment for me because he researched and thought about something that he had not reckoned with and something that I had not considered before.

KPA: That’s lovely. Thanks, Pete.

PB: Thank you.

Pete continues to edit the incarcerated students’ writing for a forthcoming publication.

Pete’s upcoming curated exhibition Cell Signals brings together cellphone pics, visitation hacks, surveillance + archive footage, participatory photography, documentary GIFs, prison news images and AI neural network portraits. The exhibition features the work of Jodi Darby, Anke Shuettler + the men of Columbia River Correctional Institution, Robert Gumpert, Brandon Tauszik + Pendarvis Harshaw, Wray Herbert-King, Adam Chin and Eddie Herena. Cell Signals runs April 9th-June 3rd, at SF Camerawork, San Francisco, Calif.

Isadora Kosofsky is a documentary photographer, photojournalist, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Her series, “Still My Mother, Still My Father” documents bonding meetings between children and their incarcerated mothers and fathers at twelve men’s and women’s prisons in the state of Florida. As the artist writes: “More than 2.7 million children in the U.S. have an incarcerated parent, and approximately 10 million children have experienced parental incarceration at some point in their lives. Nationally, there are more than 120,000 incarcerated mothers and 1.1 million incarcerated fathers who are parents of minor children. Documenting family bonding visits affords me the opportunity to not only tackle mass incarceration from a humanistic standpoint, but to also explore these experiences as escapes and temporarily fulfilled fantasies for both child and parent.”

Jacobia Dahm is a photojournalist currently based in Berlin. She describes her series, The Prison Buses — “With 2.3 million people in prison, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. An estimated 2.7 million American children have a parent in prison and the toll on families is immense. More than 80,000 people are currently incarcerated in New York State alone. After sentencing, prisoners are assigned to faraway places and children often lose a parent whose physical presence is essential for their emotional wellbeing. Ties are broken, and the effects on the most vulnerable population are immeasurable.

Every Friday and Saturday night hundreds of New Yorkers, mostly women, many with children, get on private buses and mini vans to drive all night in order to see their husbands, brothers, mothers, fathers, friends. This journey sets out from the bustling hubs of New York, yet it is invisible to most outsiders. The overnight bus ride to the different prisons hundreds of miles north of the city is a long one, often marked by anxiety, sadness, and exhaustion.”