My work comes from a deeply personal place I occupied for many years. I tell stories of the formerly incarcerated. The stories are not a new or unique but they come from a privileged standpoint of real-time experience. I speak about the old time, long time universality of criminal injustice, which targets the least privileged among us. America set up social rules and norms for us to follow. It then delves out punishment for what it sees as violations of those norms. Those of us comporting with those norms are offended by those who do not agree with our personal sensibilities.   

As a criminal defense attorney I am acutely aware of the pervasive chokehold that the criminal system imposes on millions of people and identifiable communities. The system applies unfairly to those who are not in our own sphere of community. “The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once observed that, ‘for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village.’ ”  Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe pp. 333.

At the very root of this problem is a madness of capitalism and fear. We feed the prison industrial system with its needed inmates in order to make it work. I was a part of that system as a defense attorney. I benefitted. As did the prosecutors, the police, the judges, the court staff, the parole and probation staff, the jails, the prisons, and all of us in society. Incarceration is a cycle that we must examine and break with equity,  solutions that address the real problems, and justice.

Work in progress in my studio