THE PRISON EXPERIENCE <i> by Morrie Camhi (Charles E. Tuttle Co., 28 South Main St., Rutland, Vt. 05701: $29.95; 140 pp.) </i>
Photographer Morrie Camhi was given free access to Vacaville Prison in California, where he spent a year-and-a-half getting to know staff, inmates and their families and learning the rhythms of prison life. “The Prison Experience” pairs Camhi’s photographs with essays by inmates and prison officials; together they portray the closed world that is normal daily life for thousands of people.
“Most of my photography time isn’t with a camera but with a cup of coffee, learning about the people I will photograph,” writes Camhi. Every one of the photos in this collection is a portrait, clearly taken with the input of the subject. The accompanying comments are not edited versions of oral histories taken by the photographer but written responses to his question: “What do you want people to know about the prison experience?”
Many of the statements are personal meditations on the experience of being jailed, like Melvin Love’s summary under his portrait, a hopeful-looking man working at a drafting table: “The ambience that a prisoner becomes part of is of hard-bitten, hazardous and stressful days, but there are good days that prevail. I feel if you are presumptuous in this type of life where you are preyed upon each day like an animal, (it) calls for a lot of courage to face the difficulty, danger and pain involved.”
Photographed lying on his bed as if he had not stirred for years on end, prisoner Thomas W. Bailey writes: “Time will always be the essence of prison, there was yesterday, now it’s today, tomorrow is another day. Prison is your test of time in the way you perceive it to be. At the same time, should one stop and think about it long enough, one will find that no matter what society you live in, it will also be the test of time. You either find knowledge and survive or you die slowly.”
But there are statements on the system, too, like inmate Albert Jackson’s comment: “Rehabilitation is a joke to the tune of $25,000 a year for the California taxpayer. What they are paying for is a human-warehouse corporation. . . . Emphasis must be on rehabilitation and social programs designed to aid the ex-con when he maintains a successful rate of progress. Base it on improvement, rather than total conformity with society. More than this isn’t expected of the average citizen.”
Balancing the human view of ordinary, daily life in prison are a statistical summary of problems in the prison system and an essay by Dr. Marlene Young, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance, who offers a few brief case histories of victims of violent crime. “For each of (the victims),” Young writes, “on an ordinary day in their ordinary lives, while they were doing ordinary things, criminals violently attacked and destroyed their ordinary existence.” She describes the desire for retribution that often is disappointed by the legal system, and observes that “while many victims look to imprisonment as a guarantee of their safety, most criminals will not be imprisoned for life, nor even for many years.”
The complex social problems that are addressed by the prison system is ultimately the subject illuminated by this book; the subtlety of the work underlines what an elusive goal is justice.