Images Locked in Time

Despite its infamous past, Alcatraz has always been good for an easy guffaw. In the busy Cell Block 41 tchotchke shop at the foot of Pier 41 are boxer shorts, shot glasses, aprons and black and white striped T-shirts, all stamped in screaming boldface: “I’ve Escaped Alcatraz.”

But for the cluster of people lined up this evening for the 1 1/2-mile boat ride to Alcatraz Island, the photo exhibit opening they are about to witness will most certainly take the punch out of any stale one-liners.

“Prisoners of Age,” a photo documentary project six years in the making, is a sobering and sometimes shocking examination of what life is like for infirm and aging inmates in prisons across North America. Geriatric inmates--with assorted ailments that often accompany declining years--are a rapidly growing population in penitentiaries across the United States.

In undertaking the exhibit and an accompanying book, commercial photographer Ron Levine and graphic designer Michael Wou have set out to demystify what “life sentence” really means.

Tonight when the Harbor Emperor docks at Alcatraz, the 152 invited guests and park rangers make their way up a steep incline, through crumbling archways and husks of buildings--now just silhouettes--to the old cell house. They wind through Cellblock A and down a flight of narrow stairs to what was once the shower room.

There, 23 of Levine’s 4-foot-by-8-foot prints unscroll from pipes and beams crisscrossing the low ceilings. Atop the images, open to public viewing during regular Alcatraz tour hours, Wou’s distinctive, tightly spaced fonts allow the subjects to tell their own stories. Above a disintegrating toilet and a crumbled sink, photos and stories fill wall space. The more intimate size of the smaller photographs and the text requires the viewer to step closer, taking it in.

The images almost seem to whisper: There is James Blaylock, 66, with his Father Time beard, eyes downcast, his image, indistinct, made up of tones of gray. Serving a life sentence for drug trafficking in North Carolina, he reflects, “How can I go about getting a time cut or getting a clemency act ‘cause, as you can see, I’m eat up with emphysema, I’m on three sprays a day, and a pill three times a day. That’s just for respiratory breathing.” Or Alabama murder inmate Thurmon Jetton, 68, whose face is a web of wrinkles, mouth slack, eyes astonished. “I feel like I played in hell, is what I feel like.”

Sentences of 150, 198 years. Clusters of 88-, 79-, 62-year-olds. Murder, sex crimes, trafficking drugs, robbery are among the worst. Among the most poignant is William Howard “Tex” Johnson, 67, who is serving time for snatching $24 in 1959 in Birmingham, Ala. Some inmates while away their hours into days into years in infirmaries. Their ailments range from tumors to kidney disease.

In the course of the last six years, Levine and Wou, both Canadians, say they interviewed and photographed hundreds of prisoners. They were curious, they say, about men who are confined to a finite space for an infinite amount of time.

“Rage, guns and alcohol almost invariably were the things that led them into prison,” Levine emphasizes. “Take those things away, and many of them wouldn’t be there.”

As states pass tougher crime laws, and sentence more defendants to mandatory minimum terms or life without the possibility of parole, penitentiaries are bursting at the seams.

“It’s a relatively new trend,” says Jennifer Walsh, assistant professor of criminal justice at Cal State Los Angeles. “In the ‘60s and ‘70s, prisoners were paroled. They were given an indeterminate sentence--like six months to life--and then their case would come up with the parole board, and they would meet and decide to release if it was determined that they [the prisoners] were no longer a threat.”

But that began to change in the 1980s and ‘90s, says Walsh, as voters demanded stiffer sentencing laws. “Prisons are now having to look into areas of geriatric wards and hospice care. This phenomenon is still quite new.”

Levine conceived the project after listening to a radio documentary about a prison in Alabama, which has a growing elderly population.

“I picked up the phone and said, ‘Mike, you wanna go to prison?’ ” Levine laughs now.

The duo, who have known each other for almost 10 years, since Wou hired Levine for a commercial job, set out with a photo assistant to visit the Hamilton Institute for the Aged and Infirm in Alabama. The warden there “told us that his prison was quickly becoming a nursing home,” Levine says.

The photographer set up his 4-by-5 camera in the conference room. At first the reception among the inmates was rather cool if not icy, recalls Wou. “They kept asking us: ‘You boys federal marshalls? We know you boys are federal marshalls.” But in five days, there were lines of men on IVs, with walkers, canes and rolling oxygen tanks, waiting to be photographed and then interviewed by Wou.

Armed with a passel of prints and contact sheets in March 1996, Levine went back to his agent, who thought they were show worthy. The question was where.

“I immediately got the idea of Alcatraz,” says Levine.

To mount a comprehensive show, Levine knew he needed more. Setting out with a photo assistant and a writer, David Winch, Levine traveled to additional facilities between 1996 and 1999--including the McCain Correctional Correctional Hospital in North Carolina, and the Ste. Anne-des-Plaines Institution in Canada.

Among the high-priority problems at some of these institutions, Levine says, is “keeping the young guys from beating up the old guys.”

Securing Alcatraz, which has been a national park site since 1972, took about a year. Approving the project’s proposal and content was the biggest hurdle. Though it isn’t the first art exhibit held on the grounds, says Alcatraz Island site supervisor Craig A. Glassner, the current one is among the few projects that have made it past a rather strict screening process. “We’ve had people contact us wanting to do a ‘Survivor’ type show on the island. No way,” Glassner shakes his head. “The entire island is a historical monument, so [we] had to make sure that they were not going to change the existing condition or not damage it in any way.”

Also, stresses Glassner, those who apply to use the site must “clearly express why Alcatraz would be the best place, what their interpretive goals were. The workRon and Michael are doing isn’t trying to tell people what to think. Instead, they were provoking people to think. We were very impressed. We were all moved by the images. This kind of work helps us reach our [educational] goals.”

Admittedly, the opening last Wednesday night was an odd juxtaposition, people dressed in Prada and BCBG grazing on grapes and brie and sipping Chardonnay while viewing the not-often-spoken details of crimes and horrors of prison life. In a space that once housed the likes of Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly.”

But unlike most art openings where people first make a beeline for the food then file past the installation without barely a pause, this was different. Many spent five to 10 minutes with an image, taking in the face and its accompanying story, reading aloud the text to friends. Several returned home with a copy of the “Prisoners of Age” book, published in Montreal by Synchronicity Productions Inc. Both Levine and Wou hope that in coming weeks, many more will see the show. Not just the 5,000 tourists a day who regularly visit “the Rock” but others who may want to ponder the quandaries of the criminal justice system.

Levine says that for him, the project has brought a keener understanding of violence and anger. The result, he says, is not meant to glorify, but to dignify--to see the inmates as human and frail--in all of their complexity.

“We’re not specialists or sociologists, we just wanted to pass on what we saw,” says Wou. “And life in these facilities is just a microcosm of things to come. More people are staying and dying in prison. It’s a tough human emotion you face there. We first get to know these men as humans. You get to know the person before the crime.”

“Prisoners of Age: The Alcatraz Exhibition,” at Alcatraz Island, is due to run until the end of November and may be extended. For more information on the show, book and various victims’ assistance programs, check the Web site, https://www.prisonersofage.com