THE LONG TERM
University of Chicago | Arts + Public Life | Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project
September 20 - November 21 | 2018
Between 2016-2018, artists, writers and members of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project created a series of thematic works around long-term sentencing policies and the other long terms they produce: long-term struggles for freedom, long-term loss in communities, and long-term relationships behind the prison wall. These projects emerged out of classes and collaborative work at Stateville prison, where people are serving extraordinarily long prison terms (60, 70 and 80 years), often for crimes for which they would have already been released, had they been sentenced 30 years earlier, or in a different country.
Curated by: Damon Locks and Sarah Ross
Exhibition Design: Hannah Jasper, Arts + Public Life Curatorial Team
Image credit: Daris Jasper
Interior
Floor Plan
Implemented in the 1990s and 2000s, long-term sentencing policies were ushered in as bipartisan reforms and an extension of the “tough on crime” logic. Recent state and federal efforts to reduce mass incarceration have focused on “non-violent drug offenders”. However, if the United States were to free all people incarcerated for what are called “non-violent offenses,” mass incarceration would still stand at just over 700,000, and the racial disparities of criminalization would be even more evident. While freeing people is cause to celebrate, these proposed reforms neglect half of the nation’s state prison population and forget that at one time, long-term sentences were not the norm. The Sentencing Project reports that 1 in 9 people in prison are serving life sentences, and 1 in 7 have sentences of fifty years or more. People locked in, or headed to, maximum security prisons are marked for death-by-incarceration.
Opening Reception
Opening Reception
Opening Reception
Opening Reception
Exhibition Related Program
Notes on Territory: Performance with Anna Martine Whitehead
October 5 2018
Notes on Territory is a transdisciplinary performance lecture and installation. Using movement, sound, video and text the work addresses themes of "containment architectures" (prisons, cathedrals, dungeons, and homes) and freedom.
Notes on Territory: Performance with Anna Martine Whitehead
Exhibition Related Program
Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom
October 25 2018
Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom was a book release and panel conversation with co-editors and contributors of The Long Term anthology. Conversation included: Janaé Bonsu (BYP 100), Kathy Boudin (Center for Justice, Columbia University), Alice Kim (Human Rights Lab, Pozen Family Center for Human Rights), Beth Richie, author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America's Prison Nation, University of Illinois at Chicago and Patrick Pursley (Prison+Neighborhood Arts Project) co-founder of I Am Kid Culture
Exhibition Related Programing
Teach-In on Reversing Long Term Sentencing
November 16 2018
Our community joined us for a teach-in on Long Term Sentencing with Marshan Allan, Restore Justice IL; Monica Cosby, Westside Justice Center and the 100 women taskforce to cut the population of incarcerated women in IL; Bernardine Dohrn, activist and founding director of the Children and Family Justice Center in the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern, and Eric Blackmon, North Lawndale Christian Legal Center; moderated by Earl Walker and Sarah Ross. One of the demands of the National Prison strike this summer has been to rescind the Truth in Sentencing Act and the Sentencing Reform Act and that, “No human shall be sentenced to Death by Incarceration or serve any sentence without the possibility of parole.” Incarcerated people are calling out particular laws that are locking them up for long and longer terms, yet few people know the details of these polices or how they have created mass incarceration.
