Hi, it’s Cindy Sissokho, curator of ‘Hard Graft’ again.
In the early 1990s, artist and educator Sheila Pinkel came across a sales catalogue published by the California Prison Industrial Authority, which manages factories and service industries operating within California prisons. The catalogue included office furniture and other products made by prisoners for very low wages. Californian state agencies, including universities, are required by law to buy goods from this catalogue, ensuring there is always a market for them.
In ‘Site/Unseen: The Prison-Industrial Complex’, Pinkel reproduces dozens of pages from this catalogue, along with statistics and quotes, totalling over 60 images. They are arranged in a large grid measuring almost 2 metres high by 2.5 metres wide. The prints are neatly arranged in portrait format, in 6 rows of 12. Each contains a photograph of a piece of furniture against a neutral background, captioned underneath with its listing title. The top row includes a two-seater sofa, a cement park bench, a brown fabric swivel chair, a metal shelving unit, a single-seater grey fabric lounge chair, and other similar items. From row to row each piece of furniture is uniformly bland and functional. Some of the photographs feature smiling white office workers posed in staged office interiors.
At its centre, the grid is interrupted by a larger print around the size of four of the smaller prints. It depicts a flagpole with the United States flag and the California flag, which features a grizzly bear. Beneath the image is the text: ‘Made by prisoners in a California State Prison.’ On either side of the larger print with the flags are prints with excerpts of articles and studies on the socio-economic and racial backgrounds of people currently in prison in the US. One of the sources, from the Huffington Post in 2013, declares: “One in every three Black males born today can expect to go to prison at some point in their life, compared with one in every six Latino males and one in every seventeen white males, if current incarceration trends continue.”
At each corner of the grid is an identical print resembling an optician’s eye-test chart, with rows of white letters in decreasing sizes against a black background. Each reads ‘SEEING IS BELIEVING’. Pinkel made this work to show an aspect of the prison system that is usually not seen or talked about: the use of prisoners as a cheap labour force. Through quotes and statistics, Pinkel also shows how prisons continue the racialised violence of the plantation through the geographical displacement, control and surveillance of people.
In the 19th century, prison labour was intended as a punishment or a means of spiritual and moral reform. Today in the UK, while work can no longer legally be used as punishment, it is often compulsory. Prisoners who refuse to work can have benefits or family visits reduced, or even face solitary confinement. Much of the work available is repetitive: prisoners maintain the prison’s facilities and services as cleaners or kitchen workers, or they may work for private companies, manufacturing or packing goods or repairing equipment.
Consumers who buy these everyday products unknowingly become complicit in the exploitation of this captive workforce, who do not have the same rights as other workers; for instance, they do not have to be paid the National Minimum Wage and may earn as little as £4 per week for full-time work. Outside of the workplace, prisoners also often experience dehumanising living conditions – such as overcrowding, poor sanitation, solitary confinement, and little choice over what they eat – which impact their mental and physical health. The loss of social connection and control over their day-to-day lives leads to high rates of depression and anxiety that often continue even once a prisoner is released.
This is the end of Stop 7.