Essays On Crime

Photographing people involved in crime, courts, activism and punishment is a sensitive pursuit.We wanted to learn what those in the photographs though. In part one, photographer Isadora Kosofsky spoke with the family of two young brothers from New Mexico who’d been in and out of jail.An excellent case study in how to photograph absence and loss.

Content-wise, it’s a long, but rich and rewarding list.

Let’s begin with a three-parter, commissioned by Medium and produced by Everyday Incarceration and Vantage.

They do it to get high, I do it to help with some pain issues I have.

I don’t want people thinking, ‘You know, these guys are going in there taking our tax dollars and doing heroin and getting high, look at them.

In one dispatch he talks to Anthony Ponder who was once a prisoner and now volunteers and cuts the hair of newly-released prisoners at a local church each Sunday.

Canning greens at a canning factory at which the workers are prisoners of the State of Georgia. Only about the day that passed, and the day that will come…

You know, they’re nothing but detriments to society.’ Well, I’ll tell ya, it’s saving my life.

I’m hoping within six months to have a new hip put in, and go back to work, do some part-time painting work.

We have some very outdated and exaggerated presentations of jails and prisons in popular culture.

I don’t think people can get a perspective on what it is like to lock someone down 23 hours a day, year after year, decade after decade.