Mission
The Prison Poster Project (PPP) is a collective of artists & activists working in collaboration with prisoners across the U.S.. Our mission is to create a public education tool to expose how the prison industrial complex affects our diverse communities and to challenge current reliance on prisons as a solution to social problems. With imprisoned artists, we are creating a portable mural that will be used by prison activists, educators, the incarcerated and community leaders. We choose to use art because art makes knowledge accessible across age, race, class, gender and geographic lines. Through this project, we aim to amplify the voices of many that go unheard and generate visions of a more just and caring world.
Who?!
The Prison Poster Project (PPP) working group, in collaboration with incarcerated illustrators across the country.
The PPP working group (aka “The Outside Team”) includes five creative activists based in New York City, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, who use their art a tool to raise political consciousness and effect social change. The illustrators are artists with myriad backgrounds and stories who are prisoners of America’s biggest business.
What?!
Together, we are designing a reproducible, portable, mural-like POSTER that will be used as a teaching tool to raise awareness about PRISONS.
Each member of the Outside Team is working one-on-one with artists inside prison via mail, gathering submissions that will be pieced together to create a unified composition—one that tells a complex story through pictures, of how prisons intersect with the lives of various members of U.S. society. Using an intricate collage of images, the poster will explain how the prison industrial complex affects us, our families, and the communities from which we come, and create a space that envisions a world without prisons.
Where?
The poster is being created in prison cells, apartment buildings, and imaginations across the country. The final poster, with your help, will be coming to a wall near you.
When?
The idea for the P.P.P. was born in 2003. The Project has been an ongoing process since then. We plan to have the design for the poster completed before the end of 2008, ready to reproduce, distribute, and take on regional tours throughout the U.S. beginning late 2008.
Why?!
The Prison Poster Project was formed in response to the intensifying need to speak creatively about the system of mass imprisonment pervading our society. The U.S. has more people incarcerated than any other industrialized nation. Over 2.3 million people fill our jails and prisons, and 6.6 million are under the supervision of the nation’s correctional system, with the numbers increasing at an alarming rate.
As resources are taken away from social services and invested in a criminal justice system that favors punishment over rehabilitation, it is urgent that we ask ourselves serious questions about issues of justice, safety, and human rights that affect us all. The PPP is responding to the need to amplify the voices of the relatively invisible and misrepresented prison population, that they may communicate their stories and contribute to a much-needed dialog about what the prison-industrial complex means for America.
PPP is confident that, through the process of creating and sharing this poster, we will expose some of the myths that sustain the widespread injustices occurring in prisons and in the communities most affected by the criminal justice system. Most importantly, we aim to motivate and inspire people to take positive action against the system of mass incarceration and for prisoners’ human and civil rights.
How?!
Our vision to create a poster about the prison system was inspired by a public education model popularized by the Beehive Design Collective, a political arts group based in Machias, Maine. Using 16-foot-long posters designed by the Collective, two members of the PPP toured the U.S. and South America to present a visual narrative about Plan Colombia and the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The success of this model as a way to engage people in social issues that affect their lives gave rise to the concept of the Prison Poster Project.
In March 2003 we mailed more than 1,000 questionnaires to prisoners, seeking input on the themes, issues, and experiences they thought the poster should address. In December 2003 we compiled the information from the responses and created a visual outline for a poster that would communicate the prisoners’ ideas.
At our next meeting, we designed the framework for the illustration. We decided that the central image of the poster would be a cross-section of a prison, within which each cell depicts a different story or theme from each contributor about what life is like inside prison. The space outside the prison walls is divided into two sections. To the left is a scene portraying the society that fuels the prison system. In contrast, the right hand is a space to envision a just world, free from personal and state violence, illustrating hope and what the artists would be doing if they weren’t locked up.
The five members of the Outside Team partnered with artists inside prison who expressed interest in illustrating for the project, serving as individual consultants in the design and editing process. We have already received several pieces of the poster. Currently, we are maintaining contact with the PPP illustrators, reaching out to more artists in prisons, grant-writing and fund-raising, and developing our action plan through regular conference calls.
Once the poster is completed, we will organize regional and cross-country tours to present the poster in schools, prisons, detention centers, shelters, cultural institutions, and community centers. Activists in prison have already volunteered to do presentations in their institutions, and some are even planning on touring with the poster upon release.
Because art impacts us on a level that keeps us inspired, enlightened, and committed, we believe that this poster will be an effective tool for educating and motivating people around criminal justice system issues. Art speaks a universal language, helping to build coalitions that transcend race, class, gender, and geographic lines, and making knowledge accessible to our diverse communities. We are creating a poster that is the combined effort of many different people, using art to cross prison walls and unify us in a struggle for a more just and compassionate tomorrow.