Inside the Wire: Photographs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons

As recently as the 1970s, many inmates in southern prisons lived and worked on prison farms that were not only modeled after the American slave plantation, but even occupied lands that literally were slave plantations before the Civil War, and on which working and living conditions had not changed much a century after the war. Bruce Jackson began visiting some of these prison farms in the 1960s to study black convict worksongs and folk culture. He took a camera along as means of visual note taking, but soon realized that he had an extraordinary opportunity to document a world whose harshness was so extreme that at least one prison had been declared unconstitutional. Allowed unsupervised access to prison farms in Texas and Arkansas, Jackson created an astonishing photographic record, most of which has never before been published in book form. Inside the Wire presents a complete, irreplaceable portrait of the southern prison farm. With freedom to wander the fields and facilities and hang out with inmates for extended periods, Jackson captured everything from the hot, backbreaking work of hand-picking cotton, to the cacophony and lack of all privacy in the cell blocks, to the grim solitude of death row. He also includes some early twentieth-century prisoner identification shots, taken by anonymous convict photographers for the prison files, that survive as profoundly evocative human portraits. These images and Jackson's photographs document, as no previous work has, the humanity of the people and the inhumanity of the institutions in which they labor and languish. As Jackson says, "sometimes kindness happens with prison, but prison itself is a cruel world outsiders can scarcely imagine. I hope nothing in this book suggests otherwise."

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. On the Farm 2. Rodeo 3. In the Building Notes to the Photographs

About the Author :
Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor of English and James Agee Professor of American Culture at the University at Buffalo. He is the author or editor of thirty books, including “In This Timeless Time”: Living and Dying on Death Row in America (with Diane Christian); Pictures from a Drawer: Prison and the Art of Portraiture; Cummins Wide: Photographs from the Arkansas Prison; The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories; Law and Disorder: Criminal Justice in America; Death Row (with Diane Christian); In the Life: Versions of the Criminal Experience; and Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons. His photographs and documentary films have been widely exhibited. Jackson has been named a Chevalier in the French National Order of Merit and also in the French Order of Arts and Letters.

Review :
"Although many of the men pictured were convicted of brutal crimes, Jackson imbues them with dignity, or at least a degree of stoicism."--Jeremy Lybarger, Mother Jones "In the '60s, Bruce Jackson began visiting prison farms in the south of America to document folk culture. The rich, monochrome images subsequently captured between 1964 and 1979 have been faithfully reproduced to a high standard and every image tells a story, offering a stunning and sometimes emotional insight into a harsh and intriguing environment less often seen by outsiders. An incredibly interesting subject very well captured. If you've even a remote interest in this topic, then you'll love this coffee-table classic!" - Digital SLR Photography "Documentary photographer Bruce Jackson has created a striking photographic record of Southern prison farms of the 1960s and '70s, when he was given unsupervised access to prison grounds, guards and prisoners themselves [...] Jackson's initial intention was to study black convict worksongs and folk culture, and he used his camera only to record details for his research. However, he soon realized the opportunity he had to document the archaic and brutal world of the southern penal system. Given relative freedom inside the prisons, Jackson was able to explore the lives and hardships of the inmates he met there. 'Those guards and their prisons had been nailed in the movies: if you've seen Brute Force (1947) or Canon City (1948), you've seen Missouri Penitentiary in the 1960s,' writes Jackson. Recently, he tried to revisit the places he came to know 40 years ago, but found that world now closed off and hidden. 'Those places do not want witnesses... I can't show you what happens inside the wire now. But the images in this book will, I hope, give you an idea of what happened not so very long ago. I doubt that world has changed much in the interim, other than that it is even more crowded and more mean.'" - Alex Greig, Daily Mails