English Professor C.D. Wright's upcoming book, "One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana," recently earned Wright, a poet and essayist, and collaborating photographer Deborah Luster Duke University's Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize - named for, respectively, an acclaimed photographer and a writer/social scientist. The $10,000 award is given to encourage collaboration in documentary work that examines an aspect of contemporary culture. Luster has already photographed some 800 inmates at three Louisiana prisons; Wright will give voice to their stories of life removed from society.
A sepia-tone photo of a middle-aged African-American man squatting beside a large guard dog is tacked to the cover of the plain journal C.D. Wright pulls from her briefcase. The book's pages contain the first scant notes of a portion of Wright's current project. Taped inside its front cover is a "Get out of jail free" card from a Monopoly game.
Wright doesn't need that card to leave the prison where she met the man in the photo, and it won't help him or the other inmates she's met in recent months. But her upcoming book, "One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana," may draw attention to the lives they lead inside the walls of the state prisons, isolated from their families and communities.
The book project recently earned English Professor Wright, a poet and essayist, and photographer Deborah Luster, a longtime friend and collaborator, Duke University's coveted Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize - named for, respectively, an acclaimed photographer and a writer/social scientist. The $10,000 award, sponsored by Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, is given to encourage collaboration in documentary work that examines an aspect of contemporary culture. Luster has already photographed some 800 inmates at three Louisiana prisons; Wright will give voice to their stories of life removed from society.
The pair won't tackle the headline-making controversy over the death penalty, but their work will put a face - or, more literally, faces - on one state's daunting prison statistics. Louisiana imprisons more of its population per capita than any other state in the country; more than 75 percent of its prison population is African American. At Angola, the state's maximum-security penitentiary housing more than 5,000 men, 86 percent of the inmates die in the prison.
"We're addressing this subjectively, not as criminologists or psychologists," she noted, adding that visiting the prisons has been a sobering experience.
"You quickly become aware how much more likely you are to end up in prison if you're poor, illiterate, black, mentally handicapped or unloved. You don't need a statistical rundown to see that," she said.
"And you become aware people do hard time for offenses that shouldn't warrant hard time. I'm not saying they should all be set free, but we're keeping too many too long," she added. "The rhetoric may be harsher in places like Louisiana, but in states like California and New York, we're building prisons at a greater rate than schools.
"We're putting our money at the wrong end... It says something about us if this is the best we can do."
The idea for the book came from Luster, who lives in Louisiana near some of its numerous prisons.
"One day she just turned in the gate of one and decided she wanted to photograph its prisoners," said Wright.
In the fall of 1998, the photographer began to negotiate her entrance to three prisons - Angola, a minimum-security prison farm at Transylvania and the 1,000-bed Correctional Institute for Women in St. Gabriel. Luster is taking "intimate keepsake portraits" - some in a makeshift studio, others in environmental settings. Each of the inmates who has volunteered for the project is being given copies of the photos Luster has taken. For people whose last photograph was a mug shot and who have access only to metal mirrors, Luster's images can be startling. Said one inmate upon seeing his photograph, "Damn, I done got old."
Wright has accompanied Luster on several visits and has been corresponding with inmates as she writes the book's text. She's also made "a steady diet of prison books and movies" over the past year. While she has taken pains to avoid being voyeuristic, Wright has found the inmates more than willing to talk.
"Basically, I sit on a bench and have conversations with people," she said. She recalled asking one woman what she missed most in prison; the inmate talked about taking a bath, about eating a meal with a real fork and knife, rather than plastic.
"It's the modest, almost wistful things they miss," observed Wright.
After 15 years at St. Gabriel, that same woman no longer has family or friends; visiting days are "too much."
"She has no one on the outside, no one," said Wright. "It struck me how extremely separated from the world she was."
Luster and Wright hope to complete their work by March; publication is planned for next fall.