User:Tohearts

The Joliet Prison Photographs
The photographs in this exhibit were made by inmate photographers, although their identities still have not been determined. Prison records from 1915 indicate that there were five convicts who listed their previous occupation as photographer. Reports also document that there was a room in the prison designated as the "Photograph Gallery" and that the current warden, Edmund M. Allen, had an annual budget for photographic expenses of almost $1000, approximately three times greater than that of previous administrations. Many subjects illustrated by these prints, such as the Honor Band, did not exist prior to Allen's administration. These public relations photographs were taken by an anonymous series of inmate photographers under official direction. It was not necessarily their purpose to create a clear understanding of what prison is and what it does to the minds of those who live there, but it was their purpose to illustrate the progressive changes which were taking place during an era of penal reform which lasted until the beginning of World War I, when public and political attention was then diverted to other areas.

The photographs represented here were preserved and exhibited by Richard Lawson as a professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, in 1981. Currently, there are now over one hundred prints available for private collections.

On April 1st, 1969, I was sentenced to two to six years in prison for possession of marijuana and was sent to Stateville Penitentiary where I worked in the Bureau of Identification which housed the photo labs and press operations. In the basement labs of this building were hundreds of glass plate negatives from Joliet Prison. They were awesome.

Exhibition Catalog Text

On April 1st, 1969, I was sentenced to a term of from two to six years at hard labor in the Illinois State Penitentiary, for possession of marijuana. By May I had been transferred from the county jail in Rock Island to a diagnostic depot next to Joliet Penitentiary in what once was the women's division. I was first placed in a three-man cell, approximately six feet by nine feet, which had been designed to hold one woman. A month later, I was housed in one of the round panopticon cellblocks at Stateville Penitentiary, Joliet's sister prison, where I had been assigned as an inmate photographer in the Bureau of Identification. The B of I maintains mugshots, fingerprints, and criminal records of convicts from the early days of the prison. In a corner of the basement darkroom in a few drawers of an old filing cabinet were several hundred glass-plate negatives which documented Joliet prison around the turn of the century. I spent most of my two years working in these darkrooms, producing a blend of public relations and evidence photographs for the prison administration. The photographs were used in penal publications and were occasionally released to news agencies to illustrate the events and social progress of the prison.

The photographs in this exhibit were made by inmate photographers, although their identities still have not been determined. Prison records from 1915 indicate that there were five convicts who listed their previous occupation as photographer. Reports also document that there was a room in the prison designated as the "Photograph Gallery" and that the current warden, Edmund M. Allen, had an annual budget for photographic expenses of almost $1000, approximately three times greater than that of previous administrations. Many subjects illustrated by these prints, such as the Honor Band, did not exist prior to Allen's administration. These public relations photographs were taken by an anonymous series of inmate photographers under official direction. It was not necessarily their purpose to create a clear understanding of what prison is and what it does to the minds of those who live there, but it was their purpose to illustrate the progressive changes which were taking place during an era of penal reform which lasted until the beginning of World War I, when public and political attention was diverted to other areas.

www.jolietprison.com