How Do the Prisons of Colombia, France, Uganda and the United States Compare?
Photographer Jan Banning Is Finding Out
When our Skype call connected, Jan Banning was rubbing his brow. He was trying desperately to chase down statistics with which to contextualize three-years worth of photographs .
Jan Banning has, since 2012, worked on a project called Law and Order which looks at the institutions — prisons included — that result from different philosophies and systems of justice. He recently successfully crowdfunded a book which includes photographs from four nations: France, Uganda, Colombia and the United States.
Banning spends a lot of time traveling, but more time in his studio synthesizing the meaning of his images. While he labors, he listens to Frank Zappa, The Kinks, African tunes and anything else to keep the mind-juices flowing.
Banning lit a cigarette, apologized for the disregard for his health but said the stress of hunting stats required some nicotine. Just to take the edge off. I wanted to know how he viewed different prisons from around the world, how they compared, what it was like making photographs within closed facilities.
And so we began …
What’s up Jan? How’s the work? The book?
I try to make work that contributes to the public debate. The book will include statistics about the long term development, trends and crime rates for the four countries I photographed, but also for other relevant countries. ‘Relevant’ in two senses: for one, Holland should be involved. Secondly, Germany, UK and Canada are relevant because they are industrialized too.
We can make fair comparisons?
To a degree. And make contrasts. Also, possibly Norway because of its extremely liberal prison policies. And possibly Japan because of its really low murder rates.
An American audience will find this book interesting — to really see, in line graphs, how much higher the levels of incarceration are in the U.S. compared to a lot of Western European countries and how that relates to recidivism rates.
Finding reliable sources on murder rates, incarceration rates, recidivism rates and remand rates is the big problem. But they’re essential.
Have you tried Prison Policy Initiative? Or the Vera Institute?
I have. I’ve been looking mostly in Bureau of Justice Statistics, the United Nations and the World Health Organization. These websites are incredibly confusing. You can find one year but not another. For example, U.S. murder rates starting in 1900, but the sources are so ridiculously confusing I cannot judge whether they are reliable or not. I do not want to include sources that are not verifiable.
How did you decide on the four countries — Colombia, France, Uganda and the U.S.?
I started with Uganda as because I had good connections. A friend of mine was working in the Dutch Embassy in Kampala. It was kind of an experiment to see if I could visualize this whole thing — a visual comparative analysis of law and order. After Uganda, I concluded that it would be tough but interesting.
I had, let’s say, some private courses in criminal justice from a professor here in my home town Utrecht. He said I should contact the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg which is the top European institution on criminal justice. The director there advised me. I wanted a geographical distribution so it’s four different continents. I wanted to include the two major lines of justice so the civil system in which France played a big role.
Secondly, the common law system, a more Anglo-Saxon system. Of course, I could have gone to the UK where that originated but it made more sense to pick the U.S.
A more extreme application of that type of law?
In a way. I wanted a State, certainly, that still employed the death penalty. I ended up in Georgia basically because I had the best contacts there.
I thought your choice of Georgia might have been a bit more targeted as Georgia leads the way in many of the wrong statistics — disproportionate numbers of minorities, high levels of female incarceration, poor folks locked up too.
Those things played a role, but so did the practical side.
First, I actually tried Texas because it kills the largest number of people but I just couldn’t get access. Then I saw that Georgia holds a larger percentage of people under control of the whole judicial system than anywhere else on earth. Approximately 1 in 13 adults is either in prison or in jail or in parole or on bail in Georgia.
Colombia is in Latin America. It’s a big country and it had high murder rates for a long period. Uganda seemed interesting because of its colonial heritage of common law whereas Colombia is from the Spanish sphere of influence.
Then, there are the religious-based justice systems such as Sharia. But after talking to several specialists, I learnt that real Sharia in the criminal justice system is only practiced in Saudi Arabia and Iran and they are not exactly easy to access.
The communist system is not easily accessible either and I didn’t want to fall into a kind of PR trap by trying China, so unfortunately that had to be left out.
Can you name all the different prisons you visited?
Oh my goodness, that’s a long list! In Uganda I went to ten prisons including the big ones of Luzira, Jinja and Luzira Women’s Prison. Four in France after struggling to get access for two years. Five in the U.S. of which three will be included in the book. I’ve still to make a return visit to Colombia to photograph more, but it’s as many, if not more, than in other countries.
Clearly you have a broad interest in systems and institutions of justice. How did you arrive at prisons, specifically?
My project Bureaucratics looked at one of the three pillars of the state: the executive. Law and Order looks at the judicial, the second pillar of the trias politica.
And the third pillar?
The legislative.
How do different societies handle crime? Police are involved. Courts involved. But I am fascinated by prisons. I studied history so I’ve always gravitated toward a more structural analysis. As a photographer, I’ve been never really been interested in the news or in short term events and developments.
You’re taking the longer view. An overview. So what are prisons supposed to do?
They can function an instruments of revenge for society, to punish. But as instruments of correction and as instruments to bring down crime rates, I don’t think they work.
French prisons are no hotels but they had the most humane atmosphere. U.S. prisons, in Georgia at least, were horrible. Prisons in Uganda are primitive and there’s a lot of bad things that can be said about them (corruption and bad personnel) but prisons in Uganda still gave me a much more humane impression than those in the U.S. Even in the maximum security prisons in Uganda, I was allowed to roam around freely. I had some nice relaxed chats with prisoners, even the most heavily sentenced prisoners would be patting somebody on the shoulders.
The maximum security prison in Jackson, Gerogia had a horrible atmosphere and I think that is noticeable in the photographs. For example, if you look at the photographs from Uganda, it’s earth colors, it just looks nicer, now of course that can be deceitful, but in this case I don’t think it is.
In the U.S., it is all steel and concrete, like an ice cold industry. You walk around with a couple of old marines who are heavily armed and wear bullet proof vests. Prisoners had to turn around and face the walls as I passed them in the corridor and that brings me to the conclusion that the U.S. was really extreme.
Latin American prisons have a reputation for being overcrowded and in squalor.
At first they allowed me into relatively mild prisons in 2011. Recently, however, I went to some disgusting facilities in Colombia. At times it felt like I was making propaganda for the prison authority.
It’s a long story. It’s a crisis I write about here.
Do you think as a Dutch photographer, an outsider, you are able to tell reveal something new about U.S. prisons to the American public?
I made a photograph of a guy who is bathing in a jail. Obviously I would never use that photograph in a news context for which one photograph is being used to illustrate the Georgia prisons or jails. However, as part of a series it finds it’s place.
I think my photographs give two different messages at the same time. There’s a photograph of a group of lifers that are being trained to advise other prisoners. Management matters are playing a big role there (the prison is probably trying to keep the lifers occupied there so they are not coming up with ways to make life hard for the guards).
And use them to bring other prisoners around to a more compliant set of behaviors.
True. So, something is being done for people, but it is in surroundings which look like an old factory. I’m trying to come up with a nuanced picture. And to paint a confusing picture. I hope that that will stimulate people to ask questions. Confusion is my main purpose.
In some ways, it’s more important to me that these photographs play a role in the public in the U.S. than in Europe because we have less tendency to be tough on crime and to lock everybody up than the U.S.
The U.S. needs more introspection, relatively?!
Absolutely. Homeless people are unable to get housing because of their criminal past. From a European perspective it was astounding to hear that information on them would be out on the Internet so they couldn’t get housing, they often couldn’t get a job. Now this is a weird situation. Let me put myself in the position of an employer and one of these women comes out and has a job interview with me and I am going to go on the Internet and I am going to see what I find about them. I found very few people in the U.S. who were somehow shocked by it. But when I tell people in Europe or in Holland or in Germany, people are absolutely flabbergasted
And this informed your side project of portraits of women at Pulaski Women’s Prison?
Anywhere in the world, people are trying to make clear distinctions between criminals and us — to define them as different and as bad people but I don’t think they are, actually. I could have been in prison myself many years ago. I wasn’t so I am “a decent citizen”!
Law and Order has a distant approach, but soon [after visiting prisons and meeting prisoners] I wanted another aspect. I wanted to bring these two groups closer together so that’s why I photographed the female prisoners the way I would photograph my family members or the Dutch Prime Minister.
But yet more confusion. I had to get permission to photograph them and yet all their portraits are on the Georgia Department of Corrections website!
But this work is not in your forthcoming book?
No, it was a parallel project. It’s formally different. The Law and Order book is not about portraits; it stresses the consequences and environments of different systems.
I was only allowed to ask a few questions. I was not allowed to ask, why they were in prison or for how long they were sentenced. But all that information was on the website of the Georgia Department of Corrections. So all the text that you find in my portfolio was found on the Internet.
There’s a couple of other artists I know who’ve taken umbrage at the public exchange of mugshots for entertainment, Jane Lindsay and Kristen S. Wilkins. But you’re the first male to adopt such empathy. You’re also non-American.
Apparently for U.S. citizens it’s quite normal to trade in the personal details of felons.
What do the people in Holland think of America and Americans?
The U.S. seems to have an image problem. I often find myself in the strange situation, to some extent, of defending the U.S. or bringing up nuances in conversations with friends. For Dutch people who have not spent much or any time in the U.S. it is hard to see these nuances or to have a sympathetic view of Americans.
What’s the situation like in Holland in terms of criminal justice and crime statistics and prisons?
Our prisons are underpopulated. We’ve started renting them out to Belgium and Norway because they are getting empty. A nice development. I think Holland would, in American terms, be called “soft on crime” and I think we’re doing pretty good.
The murder rates have been going down here since the 90s … here and in a lot of other countries. As far as I know, crime rates are going down as well. The reasons still allude researchers. But we can definitely say that the bigger the social difference between the richest and poorest, the higher the crime rate. That is an interesting point to put to an American audience, don’t you think?
I do. Thanks, Jan.
Thank you.
This conversation was originally published on Prison Photography. It was edited for length and clarity.
Jan Banning is a photographer based in Utrecht, Netherlands. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
