Outsiders: Designing Engagement with the Incarcerated

OUTSIDERS Designing Engagement with the Incarcerated

An mfa thesis by

Marianna Mezhibovskaya

OUTSIDERS:

Designing Engagement with the Incarcerated

This was book was created during Marianna Mezhibovskaya’s candidacy for the mfa Products of Design Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Written and designed by Marianna Mezhibovskaya.

Edited by Ruoxi Chen and Katya Mezhibovskaya.

Typeset in Galano Grotesque and Bembo.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior permission from the author. ŠMarianna Mezhibovskaya, 2016

THIS IS

WHO I AM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 HOW IT ALL STARTED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 W H AT I H O P E TO AC H I E V E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 W H AT I R E A D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 W H O I A M D E S I G N I N G FO R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 W H O I LE A R N E D F R O M . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 W H AT I D E S I G N E D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Thesis as a Prototype . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1 Thesis as a Co-Creation Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 7 Thesis as a Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Thesis as an App . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 3 1 Thesis as a Product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Thesis as a Campaign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 5 5 Thesis as Service and Business Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 6 5 Thesis as an App (Round 2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 0 9 Thesis as a Future Utopia/Dystopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2 5 Thesis as a Speculative Product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3 5 Thesis as a Marketable Product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 Thesis as an Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 M Y H O P E FO R TH E F U T U R E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 TH E G R AT IT U D E I F E E L . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321 E N D N OTE S & B I B LI O G R A P H Y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325

THIS IS WHO I AM

I am Marianna Mezhibovskaya and I am a graduate of the MFA Products of Design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Prior to coming to this program, I earned my Bachelor’s Degree in Technical Direction, from North Carolina Schools of the Arts, a program that taught the planning, construction, management, logistics, collaboration, and production of theatrical shows. After graduating in 2011, I toured America, Canada, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean by bus, train, plane, and cruise ship as the props artisan for the Blue Man Group. Upon returning to Brooklyn, my hometown, I worked at several commercial set shops, including s f d s in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. After attending the Products of Design Open House, I knew where I wanted to go next.

MFA Products of Design is a program where students design physical, digital, and experiential products. Students develop projects from concept to production, always

considering systems thinking, human-centered design, and long-term economic, environmental, and social consequences. After plunging into every facet of design in the first year of the program, we honed those skills and focus in on a particular thesis topic for our second and final year. In choosing a thesis topic, we were tasked with envisioned a future we wanted to live in. We then designed products, services, and platforms that aimed to make this future possible.

I came to this program because I was tired of realizing other people’s designs and entertaining audiences for only a few hours, days or weeks. I wanted to design products, experiences, and environments that would have a lasting impact.

This book is the result of my one-year thesis exploration in designing and inspiring compassion for a largely unseen and unheard population —the currently and formerly incarcerated.

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T H I S I S H OW IT A LL STA R T E D

I recently made one of the hardest decisions of my life by ending a long-term romantic relationship. My thesis sprung from questioning my motivations during this process.

I spent months trying to figure out how to make my ultimate choice while causing the least amount of pain for myself and or my partner. I tried framing this decision within rational boundaries of pros and cons, but emotionally, it was far more complex. My reluctance to harm was overwhelming. The ambiguity and the complexity of this experience led me to search for more definitive answers about decision-making in the fields of psychology, social and cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, and game theory.

I realized that part of my difficulty was in my sometimes being a stranger to both my own emotions and those of others. In an attempt to reduce pain, I put up walls to guard myself against vulnerability. After spiraling into deeper isolation, I eventually began to

reach out to others. And that was a welcome reminder that I was not alone and that many others shared these feelings; my friends and family showed me a huge amount of compassion. I began to heal through being social. I healed even further when listening and giving advice to others in pain. This led me to wonder if this social support scale up and out?

As my mind whirred with questions about mutual understanding versus miscommunication, acceptance versus exclusion, compassion versus indifference, emotional intelligence versus blind ignorance, fear versus trust. I finally landed on the subject of our larger social and moral responsibility towards others. I was able to recover from my own difficult situation within a network of social and emotional support; what about the excluded? The marginalized? As a society, we tend to disengage and even actively disenfranchise “others.�

Whom do we judge and exclude? Whom do we ignore? Whom do we dehumanize?

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I think about complete strangers who pass us everyday, about the homeless, about the imprisoned, all those who live at the fringes of society. How can I combat the prejudice, xenophobia, stigma, and suspicion that cloud our social judgment?

How can I break the barriers between “us” and “them?” How can I use design to develop an understanding of these largely invisible populations? How can design inspire the benefit of the doubt? How can design rehumanize otherness and celebrate what we as humans have in common?

This is where Outsiders: Designing Engagement with the Incarcerated was born.

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My goal for this thesis is to create tools for authentic self-expression. I want to create products that engage social connection through physical and digital products as well as shared experience. I want to incorporate delight whenever possible. I want to emphasize the importance of inclusion, social support, and the gift of acknowledgement. I want to create experiences that remind us of our influence on others, be it great or small. I want to empower the disempowered. I want to change the public perception of marginalized individuals, reduce stigma and the misguided desire for self-protection through distancing. I want to remind us of our humble beginnings in smaller groups and tribes where our survival depended on our inter-connectedness.

I want to make space for second chances and make room for new stories to be told. I want to demonstrate the reciprocal power and benefit of reaching out beyond ourselves. And lastly, something I realized well into my thesis year, I want to create products and services

that reimagine and reshape interactions— currently transactional and bureaucratic— into experiences that are individualized, humane, and transformative.

More concretely, I want to design products, services, and experiences that shift the negative public perception around people who are (or have been) incarcerated. I want the general public to acknowledge and engage with this largely ignored population.

I hope these changes in behavior towards the “criminalized” will result in a decrease in crime both against others--what I would like to call social harm—and against the self, or self-harm, literal and emotional. I’d like to imagine a future in which this ostracized group of people finds a place in society where they can truly escape judgment. Social harm is often committed as a result of individual and institutional harm done unto people in the past. There are many people unaware of the struggles experienced as a result of incarceration; I want my work to give them

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pause. Sometimes understanding has to be an active undertaking and bias—both intentional and unintentional—must not only be reconsidered but meaningfully confronted.

I hope this thesis inspires people to engage with those that are largely misunderstood and ignored in society and work on a resolution instead of denial and isolation.

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Looking for the hidden motivations behind my decisions, I dove into game theory and behavioral economics. I explored the rationalization of human needs and desires in Internal Game Theory (Tassos Patokos).1 I explored the breakdown of our brain processes into systems of effortless and effortful concentration in Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman). 2 I learned about the extent to which marketing manipulates our inner desires and channels them into a society based on self-interest. I felt a melancholic longing for explorations of deeper human interaction and the search for meaning in everyday life. Although my original desire was in finding a universal formula for decisionmaking, I soon discovered a stronger urge to explore the underlying emotional reasoning behind decision-making.

Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence3 was the next step. Building upon Peter Salovey and John Mayer’s previous research,

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T H I S I S W H AT I R E A D

Goleman broke Emotional Intelligence, or EI, further down into five categories: • s e l f -awa r e n e s s : the ability to know one’s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, drives, values, and goals; and the ability to recognize their impacts on others while using gut feelings to guide decisions-making.

• s e l f - r e g u l at io n : involves controlling or redi recting one’s disruptive emotions and impulses and adapting to changing circumstances.

• s o c i a l s k i l l : managing relationships to move people in a desired direction.

• e m pat h y : considering other people’s feelings especially when making decisions.

• mo t i vat io n : being driven to achieve for the sake of achievement.

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After learning these fundamental definitions in this fascinating field of study, I felt there were some critical elements still missing from the larger meaning of emotional intelligence.

My personal method of healing had been through connecting with others and helping others heal. I began to look for resources that emphasized the power social intelligence and social healing.

One night while researching people interested in mapping social connections, I stumbled onto a T E D talk by social cognitive neuroscientist, Matthew Lieberman.4 I immediately bought his book, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect.5 Lieberman starts off by explaining that our brain’s default network, when not focused on difficult cognitive tasks, is constantly consumed with thoughts of others and ourselves. He refers to this network as social cognition.

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T H I S I S W H AT I R E A D

Lieberman writes “Initially, I thought, “we turn on the default network during our free time because we are interested in the social world.” While that is true, the reverse is also true and far more interesting: I now believe “we are interested in the social world because we are built to turn on the default network during our free time.” In other words, if this network comes on like a reflex, it may nudge our attention toward the social world. And not just to other people as objects in our environment. Rather, the default network directs us to think about other people’s minds—their thoughts, feelings, and goals. To take what philosopher Daniel Dennett called “the intentional stance,” it promotes understanding and empathy, cooperation, and consideration.

It suggests that evolution, figuratively speaking, made a big bet on the importance of developing and using our social intelligence for the overall success of our species by focusing the brain’s free time on it. I bet a year on becoming a better writer, evolution bet

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millions of years on making us more social.” a loved one or exclusion from friends or soLieberman later explains how our social ciety. Using f MRI technology, Lieberman nature leads to our desire to help others even found that when people feel rejected, their when this seems irrational or impractical. “If brains register social pain in the same brain our sociality were an accident, simply anoth- areas where they feel physical pain. I began to er use of our big brains to achieve our self- wonder how else we could measure and solve ish ends by manipulating others, would we for social disconnection.

When my focus for thesis came into altruistically help others in need whom we will never meet, who will never know of our view, I read Fortune and Men’s Eyes: A Memoir good deeds? We give to others for many rea- of Broadway Glamour, Social Justice, and Political sons, but one reason is that we are wired to Passion(David Rothenberg, founder of The feel empathy and compassion for the plight of Fortune Society) 6. The Fortune Society is an others. When we see others in need, at least organization dedicated to helping the cursome of the time we think “something must rently and formerly incarcerated reintegrate be done.” Apparently this kind of compas- back into society. This book was as beautiful sion happens quite a bit. In the United States and uplifting as it is shocking and painful. It alone, we give an average of $300 billion a followed David’s transition from a career as year to charities worldwide. That is an aw- a theatrical producer to becoming an impasfully big accident.” sioned advocate for people who have experiLieberman also expounds on an idea enced imprisonment, or, as he would call it, known as “social loss.” One of the experi- “encagement.” This is Rothenberg’s stance on ments his lab conducted was around feel- the American prison system: ings of exclusion, be they from the loss of

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“Entering jails and prisons became routine for me. Routine might not be the appropriate word, because it implies the absence of emotion. In fact, although I have entered penal institutions hundreds of times in every part of the country and in several foreign nations, I am always overcome with the same sense of despair. I have never altered my initial response that a prison is an exercise in institutional futility. It is a warped concept. Prisons don’t work. They are counterproductive to society’s best interests, but when people are constantly exposed to vivid descriptions of the most horrendous crimes and acts of violence, they view prisons as-out of sight-as a justifiable solution. Kenny Jackson often suggested that if three out of four people released from hospitals returned still ill from a disease, hospitals would be put out of business. The public is rarely reminded that 98 percent of the people being locked up will be returning to society. How prisoners endure the violent prison subculture will affect their ability to adjust when they hit the streets.”

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In a similar vein, I was recommended a book called Just Mercy7 by Bryan Stevenson, a public-interest lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. It describes Stevenson’s path from law school to his current work as a criminal defense lawyer fighting the unjust life sentences given to children as well as the larger racial injustice in the criminal system. Shortly after discovering the book, I found one of the best tedtalks I have seen: Bryan Stevenson: We Need to Talk About an Injustice.8 “Well I’ve been trying to say something about our criminal justice system. This country is very different today than it was 40 years ago. In 1972, there were 300,000 people in jails and prisons.

Today, there are 2.3 million. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We have seven million people on probation and parole. And mass incarceration, in my judgment, has fundamentally changed our world.

In poor communities, in communities of color there is this despair, there is this hopelessness, that is being shaped by these outcomes.

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I represent children. A lot of my clients are very young. The United States is the only country in the world where we sentence 13-year-old children to die in prison. We have life imprisonment without parole for kids in this country. And we’re actually doing some litigation. The only country in the world. Death penalty in America is defined by error. For every nine people who have been executed, we’ve actually identified one innocent person who’s been exonerated and released from death row. A kind of astonishing error rate–one out of nine people innocent. I mean, it’s fascinating. In aviation, we would never let people fly on airplanes if for every nine planes that took off one would crash. But somehow we can insulate ourselves from this problem. It’s not our problem.

It’s not our burden. It’s not our struggle.”

This tedtalk not only inf luenced my personal conviction about the need to restructure how we tend to ignore and label “otherness,” but also influenced one of the products I designed as a conceptual piece about the death sentence.

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Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing9, by Ted Conover was also recommended to me. As a journalist interested in the prison system, Conover tried to report on its internal workings but kept coming up against locked doors. To truly see into this black box he applied for a job as a correctional officer at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. The book develops as Ted is trained for months and ultimately brought to Sing Sing, where he realizes that he is just as much in prison as the prisoners are. At first he works in a constant state of fear and relates the brutality of both correctional officers and prisoners. As he spends more time inside, his views of the roles in prison gradually shift. This book was helpful for getting an inside look at the prison system through of those who are controlled by it.

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The population I am developing my thesis around is the currently and formerly incarcerated. Something I realized early on in my research is that when trying to distinguish this population from the larger society, I would trip over my own words. In trying to design for this group as a separate entity from that of “greater society,” I confronted the exact issues with perception, prejudice, stigma, and bias that my thesis was attempting to fight. By separating the people that have been in prison or in jail from “the rest of us,” I was unintentionally reinforcing a major reason why this population has so much trouble reintegrating into society. By labeling people as “other,” we develop and consequently proliferate the language of desensitization, disenfranchisement, marginalization, ignorance, and ultimately abuse. In order to explain the origins of my interest in dehumanized populations I need to go quite a while back. Please join me on this journey.

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, constantly being told to ignore strangers. I never questioned this advice and never thought it odd until one night I was harassed by four strangers on a subway train. When these men sat down next to me and started talking to me, I remember feeling righteous in pretending they weren’t even there. I remember thinking “if I just ignore them, they will leave me alone.” This wasn’t the case that night. Instead, these four men took turns harassing me verbally and physically until I was finally able to run out of the train. Despite being physically unharmed, my relationship with the city I loved and grew up in changed drastically from that evening on.

Previously, I had been fearless. As a teenager I went to all the neighborhoods people warned about without any doubt or uncertainty about my safety. After this shocking experience with strangers on a train late one night, I changed my mind. For several years I was afraid to travel alone at night. I planned

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my trips based on daylight and the company of others.

It wasn’t until my first return to New York City after leaving for college that I was reawakened and re-sensitized to what I had always loved about this city: the conversations with people completely unlike myself.

I wanted to go everywhere and talk to everyone. I started having conversations with anyone who would initiate one, and then started initiated my own, weaving common threads between myself and this huge tapestry of strangers.

I felt a new, and seemingly counter intuitive, sense of safety as a result of being more open. By making myself vulnerable to new places and new people, I was simultaneously conveying trust and respect. It seems almost too simplistic to describe the interaction this way but when you treat people like humans, they feel like humans and return the favor.

When you treat people like they don’t deserve a response, it’s not so hard to imagine

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this can cause hurt feelings, create misunderstandings, and cause tension to escalate quickly.

So not too long after seeing the city in this new light, my theory got put to the test.

I was out with a friend late at night and two men approached us. My heart was racing and I was reminded of the unfortunate encounter on the train a few years back. But instead of closing up and brushing them off I simply welcomed them to have a conversation. It was strange at first because my confidence in the situation was contrary to the “normal” response given the circumstances, but it also made for an unlikely result. Within a few minutes the four of us were laughing like old friends and sharing things we had in common. After a while, another one of our friends met up with us. We introduced him to our newly-made friends and said good night. I’ve often wondered how differently that night could have gone. What would have happened if we told them to fuck off ?

What would have happened if we made them feel somehow inferior and unworthy of our time? Sure, approaching to two young women late at night makes your intentions look far from platonic and cordial, but I think it was this benefit of the doubt that made room for an unlikely connection on a street corner in an empty city in the middle of the night.

I’m not here to tell anyone how to respond to others but I think acknowledging someone’s presence goes a long way.

I wonder a lot about how we exclude and disregard others. I wonder that as I walk down the street and see countless homeless people looking for a helping hand. I try to imagine what unfortunate sequence of events led to them sitting out in the cold and often try to put myself in their shoes and do the little I can to show support. I also feel incredibly fortunate for having family and friends to reach out to when I’m in trouble and feel for those who don’t have social resources. I am constantly grateful for the compassion

and social support I’ve been given and ask myself where I would be without it.

After much personal strife and deliberating I chose, instead of exploring compassion in a universal way to focus my thesis work around the currently and formerly incarcerated population.

A large part of my efforts in designing products and services for the incarcerated population has been confronting my bias as well as the bias of others. Generally prisoners are seen as murderers and rapists who should be kept locked away to keep the general population safe. I knew that most of my understanding of this population came from negative stereotypes propelled by the media. The news sensationalizes extreme cases of cruelty and immorality which ultimately breeds fear and gives all inmates a bad name. When the incarcerated are released, this stigma leads to all sorts of difficulties, including finding affordable housing (due to government housing organizations having strict restrictions on

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taking in people with criminal records of any kind), finding a decently paying job (because employers don’t want to hire “criminals,”) as well as simply maintaining healthy emotional and social habits, with family, friends, and their communities. These are only a few of the major factors that result in high rates of recidivism. According to the United States Department of Justice, “more than 650,000 ex-offenders are released from prison every year, and studies show that approximately two-thirds will likely be rearrested within three years of release.”10 So how do we change society’s perception of the incarcerated? We need to examine how media portrays the incarcerated, explore the reasons why most people go to prison, and look at the types of media that aim to gives prisoners a voice so we may better understand their perspective.

Below is an excerpt from an article titled “World Behind Bars: The Expansion of the

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American Prison Sell”11 by Peter Gelderloos and Patrick Lincoln. This article originally appeared in a self-published pamphlet written by two men who had been to prison and saw the ways in which the media consistently twists our understanding of the prison population.

“Looking away from news media, we find quite a lot of attention directed towards the criminal justice system in entertainment media. In a tv guide enclosed with our local paper, we found that in one day there were 23 hours of programming relating to the criminal justice system — about the police, courts, criminals, and prison. The vast majority of these shows humanized or glorified law enforcement, and none of them were from the perspective of prisoners, or people who are treated as “criminals.” (It is important to recognize that probably every one of us have committed crimes in our lives, but most of us are never treated as criminals). The only time in recent history that a prisoner

was portrayed on the front cover of a major us news magazine, it was Martha Stewart.

Other prisoners are not given a human face.

By dehumanizing prisoners and glorifying those who lock them up, by spreading fear of crime without trying to understand it, by creating a demand for punishment without revealing the actual effects of that punishment, the media are helping create a climate in which a great many people become vulnerable to abuse.

When it comes to “typical” prisoners, who are we talking about?

Contrary to popular stereotypes, most prisoners are not “hardened killers.” Most pris-

oners are people of color, poor people, and nonviolent offenders.”

Later on in this article Gelderloos and Lincoln discuss the need to shift the judgment of crimes away from law enforcement authorities and back to the communities which they directly affect. I have been having conversations with many people on this

topic and trying to get a feel for how people think crimes should be punished. Mainly I’ve noticed that it is easy to inflict harsh punishments on strangers but obviously much more complex when considering a response to a crime committed by family members or friends.

Before I can make any definitive statements about who and how people should be judged and sentenced, I think it’s important to understand the struggles individuals face in and after prison. By getting a better grasp on the treatment of prisoners and their rates of reintegration upon returning to society, we can begin to design services that more accurately respond to the needs of the people committing crimes as well as the needs of the society that wants to live in a safer world.

For this I believe we need to hear firsthand narratives and depictions of the prison/jail experience.

I was incredibly inspired by one initiative aimed at understanding the perspective

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of prisoners. Writeaprisoner.com12 facilitates pen pal relationships between prisoners and the public. Write a Prisoner is an online platform with a large network of prisoner profiles and opportunities for prisoners to share their art, stories, poetry, et cetera. The initiative also donates a portion of their proceeds to creating and sending inmates Welcome Home Kits, which include essentials such as backpacks, toiletries, pre-paid phone cards, food cards, and more everyday essentials.

Owner of Writeaprisoner.com Adam Lovell writes, “We have the power to transcend the walls, to promote rehabilitation, to restore dignity, and to champion human rights. Mail call is often the darkest hour of the day because many of these people are forgotten.

Daily they are reminded that contact with the outside world is a privilege they no longer enjoy, a privilege many acknowledge they were responsible for losing. Receiving

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mail can lift their spirits and give them hope.

Some will never live outside of prison walls again. Others are serving shorter sentences, hoping that good behavior and a desire to live a better life will lead to their release and a productive life. These are human beings.

You must ask yourself this: Could you, or someone you love, have been sent to prison for some offense you committed but later regretted? Would you be cast off and forgotten?

Could you endure the horrors of prison rape or solitary confinement? Could you endure the isolation from the outside world? Could you hope to receive a letter, a few words of hopeful encouragement, or could you expect to languish behind bars, mocked and despised by a society that is not entirely innocent itself? “ Not only is it important to hear these personal stories to bring awareness and hopefully improve the quality of life for those that are serving sentences in prison but also to improve the quality of life for future convicts by

adjusting the treatments that best fit a rehabilitative system as opposed to a punitive one.

Despite much scrolling through prisoner pen pal websites, I have not written to a prisoner because most profiles directly or indirectly allude to looking for romantic relationship.

I’m interested in speaking with people that are incarcerated to understand their day-today life and want to avoid causing any confusion about my intentions by responding to their requests for possibly more than platonic conversation.

How are media outlets attempting to shine light on the prison experience?

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, many journalists have a hard time getting access into prisons to report on the conditions and first person narratives of the convicted. Michele Deitch, a University of Texas law professor who specializes in prison oversight, writes that “prisons are an abundant source of scoops and stories for enterprising reporters. Life ‘behind the walls’ is

rich with drama and moral complexity, and departments of corrections are as badly in need of journalistic sunshine as any other government agency. But to cover them is difficult. They are, of course, closed institutions, meant to lock some people in and keep others out. Reporters often don’t know how to get access, or they’re refused access and they throw up their hands. . . Even those who can get in must navigate a complicated relationship with correctional administrators whose goals and needs are often at odds with their own.”13 However, new shows like Netf lix’s Making a Murderer seem to be shedding new light on the criminal justice system and its constituents in order to give its audience a sense of how complex—and convoluted—the process of determining guilt can be. Another influential media source for this kind of understanding is Sarah Koenig’s Serial podcast, which investigates the circumstances surrounding the arrest and conviction of Adnan

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Syed of Baltimore Maryland in the early 1990s. In an article written in response to the show, “The One Perspective on Serial You Haven’t Heard: What Prisoners Think,”14 Kendra Hovey, who works in a medium security prison, interviewed several inmates about their responses to the case of Adnan Syed. I’ve reproduced some of them below: Ryan: Whatever it is if it’s about inmates, it’s about fear. Can’t let us out cause we’re gonna kill you, rape you, rob your banks. She presented us as human beings.

Lamar: Gives him a voice.

Todd: His life wasn’t reduced to a sound bite . . .

Lamar: Our side is very rarely heard by the public.

They read the paper, “oh yeah, he’s guilty.”

Hovey concludes that “Serial exposed just how hard it is for us to see past the cardboard cutout version of ‘criminal’ and see a human being. Sarah Koenig went into the Serial investigation thinking she’d piece a few things together and figure out the case, cut and dry. What I’ve learned from talking to

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these guys in prison, is that even in the case of clear guilt, there is always a very complicated, very human story.”

After finding this article, I listened to the Serial podcast about Adnan Syed, a man who was sentenced to life in prison at the age of 18 for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee in 1999. Despite a year of Sarah’s personal communication with Adnan and her discovery of huge gaps in the evidence presented by the prosecution against him, Koenig and her partners on the podcast still have to balance an objective telling of the story. The day I finished the podcast, Adnan was brought to court for an appeal to reopen and revisit the case based on new evidence found during the spotlight it received through Sarah’s Serial podcast. I imagine this would never have happened without the personal investment people felt listening in response to hearing Sarah and Adnan’s phone conversations. It doesn’t surprise me that hearing these events told firsthand stirs up emotions and public interest in a case that is over 25 years old.

So who are the currently and formerly incarcerated? Now comes the time to upset you with numbers and statistics that represent this population. Know that after this sequence of jarring facts and figures, I will explain to whom I spoke and how the people behind these numbers drastically altered my understanding of compassion and influenced my attempts at encouraging it in others.

The following information is sourced from an article on Policy.Mic at mic.com/policy15 • The United States has 5 % of the world’s population, but 25 % of the world ’s

prisoners.

• The total incarcerated population in the U.S. is a staggering 2.4 million—a 500 % increase over the past 30 years.

• One in every 108 adults was in prison or jail in 2012.

• One in every 28 American children has a parent behind bars.

• At the end of 2007, one in every 31 adults was behind bars, on probation or on parole.

• Currently, 65 million Americans have a

criminal record.

• There are more people behind bars today for a drug offense than there were in 1980

for all offenses combined.

• The United States spent $80 billion on incarceration in 2010 alone.

• About as many people were returned to prison just for parole violations in 2000 as were admitted in 1980 for all reasons

combined.

• Parole violators accounted for more than 35 % of all prison admissions in 2000. Of

those, only one third were returned for a new conviction; the rest were returned for a technical violation, such as missing a meeting with the parole officer.

• A first-time drug offense carries a sentence of five to ten years. In other developed countries, that sentence would be six months of jail time, if any at all.

• The vast majority of those arrested with a drug offense are not charged with serious offenses. For example, in 2005, four

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out of five drug arrests were for possession, not sales.

• In the 1990s , marijuana possession accounted for nearly 80 % of the spike in arrests.

• Three out of four young black men in Washington, DC, can expect to serve time behind bars. This is despite the fact that people of all races use and sell drugs at the same rate.

• African-Americans comprised 12 % of regular drug users, but almost 40 % of those arrested for drug offenses.

• More than 96 % of convictions in the federal system result from guilty pleas rather than decisions by juries.

• Conservative estimates put innocent people who plead guilty between 2 % and 5 %, which translates to tens of thousands of innocent people behind bars today.

• Eighty percent of defendants cannot afford a lawyer. Tens of thousands of people go to jail every year without ever talking to

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a lawyer or going to trial.

• A public defender will routinely have a caseload of more than 100 clients at a time.

Considering the vastly different kinds of people and offenses grouped under the term “currently and formerly incarcerated,” I want to explain my own understanding of these labels and my choice in not choosing a more specific audience to focus on within incarceration. I’d also like to define my understanding of social judgment, and what I consider our moral and social responsibility to be.

As I have mentioned, the main audience for my thesis work is people who are currently and formerly incarcerated. I know this may seem like a massive umbrella category, but it is intentional. There are certain groups within this population that have uniquely different experiences such as those suffering from mental illness, the black and Latino community, and the minorities in prisons and jails

which are made of women and adolescents.

The socioeconomic status of these individuals is equally varied; however, a huge fraction of the people serving time were living in poverty prior to conviction and in most cases imprisonment worsens their financial statuses upon release.

As far as jail time or prison sentences go, it is an immensely varied grouping that ranges from work release programs, (where you get to leave your correctional facility to go to work,) to short 90 -day sentences in jail, to several years spent in prison, and all the way to life sentences. The average sentence length in the United States is 63 months.16 In 2012 , less than half of the incarcerated population was convicted of violent crimes such as murder, manslaughter, non-negligent manslaughter, rape, other sexual assault, robbery, assault, amongst others. The other half of convictions consisted of non-violent offenses such as burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, other property crimes, court offenses,

commercialized vice, morals and decency offenses, liquor law violations, other publicorder offenses, juvenile and other unspecified offense categories.

Despite these varying circumstances and experiences I chose not to focus my work on any one specific group. This is in part due to the fact that I don’t feel I have enough expertise to solve for the problems concerning people such as those who suffer from mental illness in prisons and jails. And despite acknowledging and understanding that there is massive racial injustice in our criminal justice system, I don’t believe I have the tools to solve for that problem either within the context of a single graduate thesis project.

What I do know is that all of these people are people. As of 2012, there were 160,000 people out of the approximate 1.57 million in federal and state prisons across the country, that are serving life sentences.17 One out of every nine people in prison is serving a life sentence. That means the other eight out of

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nine people will eventually return to society and become the formerly incarcerated. The formerly incarcerated population is quite varied as well in terms of successful reintegration and possibility of recidivism. These individuals encounter endless challenges concerning access to identif ication, safe housing, employment, food and clothing, not to mention social acceptance.

The experiences of people who are or have been in prisons and jails can be greatly altered by acknowledgement and support from the non-incarcerated public. It is with social support programs and services that we can reduce the overwhelming and incredibly unfortunate numbers that make up our criminal justice population. I believe Americans need to undergo a restructuring in our social judgment as currently those who have experienced incarceration have an immensely difficult time decoupling their sense of self from their often traumatized pasts.

By social judgment I mean to imply the kind of bias, stigma, and prejudice that

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largely alters the way a person functions within society. The kind of judgment that lingers and affects every decision they make.

The kind of judgment that is both difficult to overcome personally and publicly.

My thesis work aims to provide tools for self-expression by—and acknowledgment of—this population in a personal and universal way, from the creation of C O N V I C T I O N , a firsthand storytelling tool to engage the public in offering support, to S O C I A L B O O S T , a service dedicated to helping the currently and formerly incarcerated feel seen and personally welcomed back into society. To explain my understanding of our social and moral responsibility towards others I would like to use a quote by Bryan Stevenson from his empowering ted talk about our criminal justice system.

“I was giving some lectures in Germany about the death penalty. It was fascinating because one of the scholars stood up after the presentation and said, “Well you know it’s

deeply troubling to hear what you’re talking about.” He said, “We don’t have the death penalty in Germany. And of course, we can never have the death penalty in Germany.”

And the room got very quiet, and this woman said, “There’s no way, with our history, we could ever engage in the systematic killing of human beings. It would be unconscionable for us to, in an intentional and deliberate way, set about executing people.” And I thought about that. What would it feel like to be living in a world where the nation state of Germany was executing people, especially if they were disproportionately Jewish? I couldn’t bear it. It would be unconscionable.

And yet, in this country, in the states of the Old South, we execute people—where you’re 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black, 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white—in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched. And yet, there is this disconnect . . .

We need to find ways to embrace these challenges, these problems, the suffering.

Because ultimately, our humanity depends on everyone’s humanity. I’ve learned very simple things doing the work that I do. It’s just taught me very simple things. I’ve come to understand and to believe that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. I believe that for every person on the planet. I think if somebody tells a lie, they’re not just a liar. I think if somebody takes something that doesn’t belong to them, they’re not just a thief. I think even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer. And because of that there’s this basic human dignity that must be respected by law. I also believe that in many parts of this country, and certainly in many parts of this globe, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth. I don’t believe that. I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.

And finally, I believe that, despite the fact that it is so dramatic and so beautiful and so inspiring and so stimulating, we will ultimately not be judged by our technology, 33

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we won’t be judged by our design, we won’t be judged by our intellect and reason.

Ultimately, you judge the character of a society, not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged, but by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated. Because it’s in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are.”18 To build upon the work of Br yan Stevenson, I hope that my work creates the space for conversation and compels people to engage with those they might previously have deemed “other.”

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One of the biggest underpinnings of the MFA Products of Design philosophy is that “you are not your own user.� To design for a cause, you must design for the people, and to design for the people, you need to ask them what they want and need. In the beginning, while I was still confused about my ultimate thesis topic, I began interviewing friends and acquaintances about times when they felt included or excluded, moments when they reached out for help, and moments when they offered it to others.

I was tr ying to understand the nuanced details of what it means to feel part of a community. I have since realized the people I interviewed throughout this year fit into a few categories: Outsiders, Mediators, Researchers, Entrepreneurs, and Insiders.

The interviews below are presented within these parameters and are slightly outside of the chronological order in which they occurred for the purposes of a clearer narrative.

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OUTSIDERS

I interviewed B E N , a member of Alcoholics Anonymous who felt welcomed by a group of people who shared similar experiences. From Ben, I learned that the sheer power of collectively sharing personal stories of struggle drives home for us how connected we are, even and especially when we feel completely alone and excluded. He also talked about how digging into all of your past mistakes and asking for forgiveness helps us heal ourselves.

I spoke with my professor and mentor, S I N C L A I R S M I T H , who is a member of the Social Therapy Group, a group dedicated to healing in a social setting, where members serve as mirrors for one another. This form of therapy helps people improve their expression of internal states in ways that reveal their deepest values, fears, and inhibitions and allows them to overcome them with the help of others.

“Accepting that you need help is one of the biggest steps towards asking for it.”

“No one lives alone with anything.“

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told me about her time adjusting to the small town of Bouanane, Morocco while doing Peace Corps: ANNA KHANDROS

“I was really integrated into my community but by and large i always felt like an outsider and lot of it had to do with religion. i was the first volunteer in the village and the only non-Muslim in my community. I had some students telling me I was going to hell. It wasn’t something that bothered me on a day to day.

I’ve lived here for two years but I’m still the random American with a cat.”

THIS IS WHO I LEARNED FROM

L I L L I A N J I M E N E Z told me about her work as a horse trainer at GallopNYC, a stable that offers horseback riding programs for children with autism and groups of at-risk youth:

“Therapeutic horseback riding is about giving people a sense of control. Control of their bodies and the horses on which they are riding to provide them with a sense of agency and freedom, both of which the riders normally lack in their lives.”

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K R I S J U L I O is a good friend with whom I have spoken at length about different forms of inclusion and exclusion specifically about his experience in the gay community. Kris told me how excluded he began to feel when becoming more vocal about his sense of self as a man in a woman’s body:

“Despite its seemingly inclusive tone, the gay community can be really harsh towards its own.”

OUTSIDERS

D A N I TAY L O R spoke about her time touring the world with different theatrical shows and the way she quickly learned to build rapport with her traveling crew and the locals she would meet every few days in new cities:

“When multiple people are outside of their comfort zones, they can connect on a deeper level.”

M E D I ATO R S

M AYA who requested to be identified only by her first name due to the confidential nature of her work, studies Drama Therapy and worked with people who are incarcerated at Bellevue Psychiatric Center. My conversation with Maya was one that first led me to developing a thesis around engagement with incarcerated people. She spoke about confronting personal bias when interacting with inmates, in order to see people struggling with mental illness in prison as people who are broken and ignored:

“I don’t know if people are bad but I know people are broken and their broken pieces cut people.”

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K E L L A N , who requested to be identif ied only by his first name due to the confidential nature of his work, is a Child Protective Specialist and told me about his work stepping into homes where there was risk of domestic violence. He often felt like he was risking his life due to the vulnerable nature of his work:

“We’re basically half-cops, half-social workers, without the badges and guns. We visit the home unannounced, introduce ourselves, interview everyone at home, and assess the immediate risk and safety of the kids without being accusatory.”

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C H R I S T I N E H A T C H was a member of the InsideOUT Writers program and taught writing workshops for groups of women that are currently incarcerated. As a writer and slam poet, Christine believes in the power of writing as self-expression:

“Holding things in is like having cancer.

It starts out really small and then gets really big and is hard to control. Writing is like getting it out.”

Christine spoke of confronting bias, much like Maya in her interview:

“No one has never done anything wrong. I went in with that established.

We’re all there to learn from each other.

Sometimes it was unclear who was counseling whom. Allow for the humble moment when you get called out to recognize your bias.”

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is my friend and classmate in the Products of Design program. He previously worked with the Possible Arts program at Rikers Island Jail. He told me about the strict instruction he was given to not be too vulnerable with the inmates: A D A M F U J I TA

“You could go in and be kind, but you had to be firm . . . No friendships, we weren’t there for that. We were service providers.”

Despite that, he made space for the inmates in the playwriting workshop to share their personal experiences through writing, directing, and performing:

“I’d never been inside o f a correctional facility. It was really amazing to see a guy transition so fast the first time he saw people saying his words.”

M E D I ATO R S

THIS IS WHO I LEARNED FROM

R A N D Y M U L D E R is the creator of the Village Playback Theatre in nyc and has worked as a drama therapist in multiple prisons over the last 15 years. This was one of the most compelling interviews I had and played a huge role in my decision to dedicate my thesis to improving the lives of people that are currently and formerly incarcerated. Randy spoke of witnessing major transformations in the men he worked with. The inmates who participated in his workshops wrote, directed, designed, and performed plays based on their lives. When it was time to perform, Randy invited an audience outside the prison to watch the shows and observed how moved the men were to be seen and heard, to feel like they added some meaning to their lives as well as the lives of others. He told me that it was:

“great to work with men who were

hungry for skills, experience, and connection. Men, hungry for being seen as something other than their worst mistake. . . Performance elevates people to be happier and do better things . . .

Inmates felt a profound sense of acceptance and forgiveness, completely against their paradigm. The need for forgiveness is so strong. After the public performance, depression would set in.”

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L I S A M . T H U R A U is the founder and Executive Director of the non-prof it organization, Strategies for Youth. I interviewed her about her work finding new means of communication between at-risk youth and law enforcement in order to minimize rates of incarceration. Her organization has developed games and workshops such as “Juvenile Justice Jeopardy” and “Policing the Teen Brain”, which focus on educating and empowering both groups while finding common ground:

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“We need to make police understand that kids ages 12–14 are most psychologically vulnerable to coercion and peer pressure. Our “Justice Jeopardy Game” teaches to kids how to navigate interactions with other kids and with the police.

We need more government support so we can have ‘evidence-based training’ and prove that our strategies reduce rates of incarceration.”

M E D I ATO R S

B R I A N L U M P K I N is a former Assistant Police Chief at the Houston Police Department.

He was introduced to me by Lisa M. Thurau because of his involvement in Strategies for Youth as a police trainer. He leads “Policing the Teen Brain” workshops with willing law enforcement off icers around the country aimed at developing a deeper understanding and sympathy for teenagers. He spoke to me about working with hardened police officers, breaking down communication barriers and reestablishing police as members of a community that support and protect, not harass and punish unnecessarily:

THIS IS WHO I LEARNED FROM

“If you want real change you need to change what you measure, change who you hire so you can get the right people, and then you have to train differently. Then you’re gonna wind up getting the police who change society.”

After spending several days with police department they would turn up the ante by “bringing in teenagers from the community and having them role play as police officers so police can empathize with them.”

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R E B E C C A H U M P H R I E S is a youth Ser vices Executive Director in the Tippecanoe County, Indiana Government who was also introduced to me by Lisa M. Thurau through her work with Strategies for Youth. Rebecca has been working in juvenile justice since 1998. We spoke about alternatives to incarceration, training of law enforcement to help better cope with adolescents, and the power of letting adolescents make their own decisions. We spoke about agency and empowerment, even for those who might not normally be trusted with decision-making. When I asked Rebecca about an “aha” moment in her career she told me about two eye-opening encounters with two young men:

“Worked with a kid that was court committed to a psychiatric facility.

He came in and was pissed and

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disrespectful. He started throwing things off my desk so I helped him clear the desk. It wasn’t about me, it was about him, and when I joined him I let him be where he needed to be.”

The second story was about letting a young man make a difficult choice while remaining supportive:

“We had a policy about not running away. You restrained them, tackled them, sat and talked for hours, treated them as victims. Kid said he wanted to run away. I said OK, walk with me, and opened the door. He chose not to leave.”

M E D I ATO R S

is an artist and friend of my mother’s who was introduced to me because of his community work with at-risk youth, drug addicts, alcoholics, and people affected by incarceration. Angel worked in the community he grew up in Harlem in the 1970s as a photographer who helped his students see life from new perspectives. We spoke at length about the power of art and expression: ANGEL IBANEZ

“Art is exposure. It takes courage to expose yourself. I’m not gonna tell you how to see life, I can just tell you how to arrange it.” He also values respect and self-respect, empowerment and agency: “When people respect their own life, they will respect other’s lives and build a society of consciousness.”

THIS IS WHO I LEARNED FROM

J U S T I N P E N N E R is a Clinical Psychologist who has worked with the formerly incarcerated population. He discussed methods of treatment including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, emotional conversational therapy, etc.:

“We have to violate the rational way of thinking, pay more attention to what’s unsaid. How do we make the unspeakable speakable? We are constantly in the dark.”

We also spoke about the importance of selfcare in dealing with others in their times of struggle. It is important to keep yourself at a safe distance from your work so that you can help effectively:

“Self-care is a priority for most mental health clinicians, but not part of the curriculum in graduate school.”

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D O U G B A L D E R is an architect and passionate advocate for the marginalized. Doug told me about his current work with the New York City Housing Authority and his attempts at fighting policies that privatize apartments intended for those in need housing assistance.

Doug told me of his political upbringing, stemming from his childhood in Baltimore, growing exposure to openly political professors, grassroots organizing, and mixing art with politics through the “All Stars Project”, an organization dedicated to improving the lives of at-risk youth. ‘

“What kind of city do we want to live in?” he asked. “Where wealthy middle class and low-income people can live together and create new institutions that aren’t mediated by other institutions or government and individually funded.”

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M A R I A N A K A P L U N is a paper artist and professor of Sustainable Design in Chile. Mariana was introduced to me by John Thackara for her social innovation work with jails. Mariana takes her students, comprised mostly of women, to work with male prisoners in designing objects that can improve their quality of life during their imprisonment. Her collaborations have resulted in pedal-powered drying machines, paper-making and book production, as well as projects concerning the design of beds for conjugal visits:

“They appreciate that we go there. They really know we are there to help them.

You do have to be alert, but there are so many moments you feel like you connect with the essence of the people. The work is empathy.”

M E D I ATO R S

L E S L E Y A C H I T O F F is the Director of Creative Therapy at Rikers Island Correctional Facility. She works with women and adolescents, the minority populations in the jail.

We met after I attended an exhibit she curated showcasing work from inmates at Rikers in the Masters of Art Therapy department at the School for Visual Arts. We had a fascinating conversation concerning her transformative work with her groups addressing clinical goals, self-esteem, self-acceptance, and contact with family and friends. Unfortunately at a jail that on average holds 10,000 inmates, transactional procedures are more commonly used than individualized programs services:

THIS IS WHO I LEARNED FROM

It is dominated by the largely hostile relationships between inmates and correctional officers:

“I started to give art therapy sessions to some of the guards so they can understand its effects and treat inmates with more compassion and less aggression.”

This interview ended up being one of my most insightful windows into the procedural side of jail. Along with learning a great deal from Achitoff, I was able to get one of my design products into Rikers with her help. I will revisit this project later in the book.

“Rikers is not a psychiatric institution.

In order to see everyone you would need one person for every 10 inmates.”

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is a PhD student studying the Sociology of Criminal Justice at New York University. He informed me of rehabilitative programming and services of the 1970’s and 1980’s moving out of prisons and jails and into the community. John recommended I look into restorative justice based on our talk about compassion in the criminal justice system.

JOH N HALUS H K A

“Some sociologists think these therapeutic programs can be disempowering because [they look] inward and are ignoring the justice system.”

I can see this rationale but also think it is important to elevate and empower the people currently trapped within the system as opposed to only fighting it from the outside.

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M A R Y M U R P H Y C O R C O R A N is an Appl ied Psychology student at New York University who I found through a paper she wrote on the negative effects of solitary confinement.

Mary had previously worked as a Legal Aid intern: observing trials in court, and sitting in on interviews with family, where she began to notice patterns in family dynamics.

She referred to some of the people coming out of solitary confinement as being

“dulled, stone cold, [with] white-knuckled tension they carried in their bodies.”

E N T R E P R E N EU R S

T O M M Y S A F I A N is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Refoundry, a new non-profit organization that teaches formerly incarcerated individuals to repurpose and refurbish discarded materials into furniture. I discovered Refoundry late one night while researching reentry initiatives and was delighted to find my interest in incarceration and my background in carpentry and construction melded into one. I immediately arranged an interview with Safian, and despite his incredibly busy schedule, he was able to carve out some time for me. We spoke about the jarring statistics behind incarceration and recidivism. I attempted to speak about compassion and compliment Tommy on his meaningful work, but distinctly remember the practical and transactional manner with which we spoke about his role and his company:

THIS IS WHO I AM

“Every human shares one resource and that’s time. In prison, people have a lot of that.”

I had gotten him on the phone at a time when his company was just getting off the ground and he was bubbling over with pitches for people who lacked information about the state of people trapped in the vicious cycle of incarceration. I met several Refoundry employees at the Brooklyn Flea in Sunset Park, where they show and sell their handmade furniture every weekend. The work is beautiful and the story is powerful.

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is another powerhouse entrepreneur who works with the formerly incarcerated. Teaching in the public high school at the Rikers Island jail for three years, Lexton founded and is the Executive Director of Drive Change, a social justice initiative that hires formerly incarcerated youth between the ages of 16 and 25. Drive Change operates a food truck “SnowDay”, which produces food sourced from local farms: J O R DY N L E X T O N

“Our philosophy is that through human action and self advocacy we can dispel preconceived notions about what it means to be a formerly incarcerated person.”

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“[The SnowDay food truck is] intentionally a transitional job model as a fellowship experience, accelerator, access to money, and access to skills to go on and obtain future careers or go back to school.”

Requiring no previous experience, fellows are hired and trained in food safety, mobile vending, hospitality, workforce development, and much more.

INSIDERS

During this period of interviewing I learned about The Fortune Society, a nonprofit advocacy and service organization dedicated to helping currently and formerly incarcerated individuals reintegrate into society. It was founded by David Rothenberg in 1967 and helps to house, employ, educate, and support those affected by the criminal justice system. Their message and mission is beautiful. Gerald D. Eber a member of the Board of Directors wrote on the Fortune Society website that

“it is truly gratifying to support an organization that is committed to assisting the marginalized and will not turn away anyone who is seeking help.”

THIS IS WHO I LEARNED FROM

This incredible organization is

“founded on the belief that society’s toughest members are also some of its most vulnerable, and even prison inmates and the formerly incarcerated deserve the chance to turn their lives around.”19 I found The Fortune Society through an advertisement for a performance called “The Castle”, told by four people who had collectively served more than 60 years in prison.

This performance gave me insight into the struggles faced by four individuals chronicling their childhood, imprisonment, release from prison, introduction to Fortune, and the transformation of their lives from that point on.

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K A N D R A C L A R K is the Grants Associate at The Fortune Society in Long Island City, New York. When we met she walked me around the facility and introduced me to all the programs and services Fortune offers for the formerly incarcerated, as she subtly interjected her own history with incarceration having served two years in prison. As I walked around, I viscerally sensed the bond of a community tied together by struggle and the overcoming of that struggle. Clark and I spoke about her work in a women’s prison as a legal clerk, helping other inmates with their cases and parole officers. After I mentioned my projects Conviction and Social Boost (explored in the Design Lenses chapter) concerned with storytelling during time spent in prison and designing for the moment of release from prison and jail, Clark told me about a program called i-can that works on

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release planning in partnership with Rikers Island. When asking about policies concerning release times from jail and prison, Clark mentioned that the official moment of release time for women from Rikers was changed from three a.m. to f ive a.m. due to an instance of rape. This reaffirmed my desire to push for a service dedicated to moment of release pick-up and led directly to my next interview with Yolanda Morales.

INSIDERS

YO L A N D A M O R A L E S is the Senior Director of Fortune Society’s i-can program at Rikers Island. i-can works with discharge planners at Rikers and case managers in the community to help inmates plan for their futures through career services such as osha and food handling classes and certifications during and upon release from incarceration.

Morales told me about her introduction to Fortune Society after her five-year prison sentence. She learned how to appropriately answer the job application question concerning prior convictions or felonies at Fortune with

“Yes, I served time, but here I am today trying to change my life and make a difference.”

Morales remembered her release: getting on a Greyhound bus for two days without anyone to talk to. When I told her about a

THIS IS WHO I LEARNED FROM

pick-up service I was designing called Social Boost, she described how i-can transports their participants from Rikers to Fortune, where they sometimes invite the family for pick-up, and offer free meals upon reentry:

“We give them a kit: razor blades, toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, brush and comb, towel. We also give them Metrocards, we also give them gift cards when completing a program anywhere from 25 to 200 dollars.”

Morales mentioned two things to consider when improving Social Boost. The first being that “sometimes when an individual goes home they don’t want a fresh meal, they get cranky.” The second being that in order to get approval to drive onto Rikers to pick someone up you need to have a record of two years free of incarceration and probation.

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L is a web and graphic designer who had a short encounter with incarceration and requested to have his name w ithheld.

Introduced to me by a mutual friend, L told me about his short jail sentence for small misdemeanors. He walked me through a day and night in the life of an inmate in county jail:

“They try to disorient you as far as your daily schedule. Breakfast at four a.m., lunch at 10 a.m., and dinner at two or three p.m.. You’re up at three, gotta make your bed before you eat. They give you something to lower testosterone in your food. Lessening the chances of fighting, live a bit more dormantly. Do a random search 2–3 times a week and always while you’re sleeping. Put you in the hallway and dump everything.”

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INSIDERS

He also told me about his brother who struggles with drug addiction and has been in and out of prison for the last 10 years:

“In other countries you get rehab. That’s not our system. If he was simply doing rehab after his first time. He owns his actions but he’s clinically depressed, self-medicated to feel better. He is a fullfledged addict and can’t hold a job even though I got him some. He is extremely talented but meth is everything to my brother. At no point in the last 10 years has he had a mandatory completion of a program. I see guys getting released to halfway houses. But he gets released back to his wife who doesn’t have the tools.”

This incredibly insightful interview immediately led to my researching mental illness and drug addiction in the prison system.

INSIDERS

R OY W AT E R M A N is the Director of Programs and Head Chef at Drive Change. Introduced to me by Jordyn Lexton, Roy volunteered to share some insight on the topic of incarceration as he himself spent over 12.5 years in prison. This interview was clarifying in that Roy helped me understand the differences between federal and state correctional facilities. He told me about his difficulties with acceptance as a child and how this later influenced his involvement in gangs and drugs.

We spoke about self-expression and his fiveyear involvement in the Merle Cooper therapeutic program during his time in prison.

The group of 80 men in the program would meet

THIS IS WHO I LEARNED FROM

When I asked about his emotional experience in prison and whether he expressed it in writing he said,

“I didn’t write for myself but I wish I had. I’ve lived three life times. I’ll write a book some day.”

Roy also told me about the support he had from his family at his moment of release.

Roy believes

“the most important thing you can give is support. To me the single most important thing is a stable living condition.”

“every week, three times a week someone would get on the stool and tell their life story.”

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T H I S I S W H AT I D E S I G N E D

This chapter is the meat and potatoes of my thesis work. This section of the book is broken down into design sprints completed in the first semester and refined work done in the second semester.

The fall semesters consisted of many classes but only one specifically geared towards exploring our thesis topic. Thesis I: Research and Design is taught by Allan Chochinov, Founder and Chair of the program, and Andrew Schloss, Director of Brand at Reinstein/Ross and long-time colleague of Allan’s. In addition to starting the interview process with potential subject matter experts, our assignments consisted of week-long sprints exploring physical products, co-creation workshops, service pitches, mobile app interventions, social enterprise ideas, followed by business models, and marketing campaigns related to the physical products. These short design sprints stretched our imaginations and understanding of our topics and audiences while building upon

insights generated from our interviews, desk research, and user-testing.

The second semester is a much deeper dive into the work started in the previous semester. Each of the design sprints is explored more deeply in class dedicated to that design lens. Physical product design is further explored in Product Futuring with Sinclair Smith. Service pitches are revamped and refined between Service Entrepreneurship with Steven Dean and Business Modeling with Janna Gilbert. Applications are reiterated and improved upon in Designing for Screens with professor Brent Arnold. Desk research, blog and thesis book writing, critical thinking, goals and objectives restructuring, and sanity are probed in Thesis II: Information Architecture and Resolution taught by Abby Covert.

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TH E S I S AS A P R OTOT Y P E

The first assignment asked us to ignore all personal inhibitions and think far and wide about all the possible physical manifestations of our thesis research and insights. After sketching as many product ideas as possible, we built three prototypes that most strongly represented our goals.

My initial prototypes were inspired by Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence, my understanding of behavioral economics, and focused on means of expressing internal thoughts and feelings in external and tangible ways.

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T H ES I S A S A P R OTOT Y P E

T H ES I S A S A P R OTOT Y P E

W E I G H T reveals the invisible. Compelled by my own confused feelings after having gone through a difficult break-up, I thought of this product serving as a personal check-in device or creating a new ritual of introspection. As opposed to looking in the mirror and trying to match or mask my feelings with my external appearance, how could I help confront those emotions and better express my authentic self ? My “scale� would leverage existing technology and include biometric sensors that could determine mood based on sweat and heart rate.

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T H ES I S A S A P R OTOT Y P E

Unlike regular scales that measure physical weight (the confronting of which causes a wide variety of emotional responses) this scale aims to make the invisible emotional weight you carry visible.

Step on and see whether you are closer to feeling anticipation or joy, or feel trustful rather than fearful.

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T H ES I S A S A P R OTOT Y P E

My next prototype was titled P E R M I S S I O N and consisted of a set of analgesic patches labeled with positive and negative emotions. The patches were inspired by nicotine patches for smokers. I wanted to create an object that boldly revealed and projected internal states into public space and sight.

I welcomed users to apply the permission patch to the physical places on their bodies where they felt they carried their feelings.

Not only would this help them acknowledge that they were experiencing that feeling, but also focus on healing through the cooling and healing sensations caused by the patch itself.

When testing the patches on multiple classmates, I noted that different people carried the same feeling, such as angst on different parts of their bodies.

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T H ES I S A S A P R OTOT Y P E

Aiming to reveal the emotional associations we have with certain habits, good and bad, I N D I C AT O R is a pack of cigarettes that help you get through what you’re going through.

Choose a cigarette with a color strip that shows the emotional transition you would like to go through from the start of your smoke to the finish. For example, if you are feelings angry and need to calm down, you might choose the red tipped cigarette and watch it slowly fade to blue as you consume it. This product is in no way meant to encourage smoking. It is simply meant to reveal how we tie our emotions to physical objects and actions and how watching a visualization of a process helps confirm and strengthen that process.

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For several years I have been developing a list of questions that I ask people when I first meeting them. They begin as ice breakers as I ask light-hearted, hypothetical questions about super powers, that inevitably lead to my new potential friends and myself revealing our pasts, our emotional and physical injuries, our most memorable moments, and eventually their core values and spiritual beliefs. R E C I P R O C A L is a gamification of the deeply moving conversations that have resulted from my question-asking. The game is played by traveling through a circular maze.

At the entrance of each ring of the maze, players are confronted with an obstacle. Each obstacle is connected to a question. Once all players have answered the question, the obstacle is removed and they can move on to deeper questions. As the game goes on, we gain a deeper understanding of the people with whom we are interacting, whether they are strangers or close friends.

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If you could go back in time to witness an event, what would you go see?

1

If you had to lose one of your 5 senses, which one would you give up?

5

6

What is your earliest memory?

7 9

3

4

10

8

List 5 things you hate and 5 things you love about yourself.

2

If you believe we are all here for a reason, what do you consider your calling to be?

What is the most impactful dream you have ever had?

What is the worst physical/emotional injury you have ever had?

T H ES I S A S A C O - C R E AT I O N WO R KS H O P

T H E S I S AS A C O - C R E AT I O N WO R KS H O P

I designed the T O O L S O F M A S S C O M P A S S I O N workshop to explore how others might build tools that foster and encourage compassion.

I had seven participants that included close friends, family, and acquaintances. I created a character for myself in order to set the tone for the workshop without letting my personal connections to my participants get in the way.

We started by doing an applied theater exercise called “cross the room.” Participants were split into two groups that faced one another. I prompted them to reveal a personal detail or experience, a moment of pride or shame. When sharing the person would cross the room along with anyone else who had had a similar experience or feeling, or had felt another’s story resonated with them. Within moments the group was sharing openly and flowing past one another, creating a visual web of common ground and common understanding.

Next, I asked the participants to share their definitions of compassion and describe

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a moment in their lives when they wish they had been shown more compassion.

Ever yone’s def initions were dif ferent.

Everyone’s stories differed even more. Some people focused on a very specific detail when they felt betrayed by someone close to them.

Others focused on being misunderstood during a certain phase in their lives. After each person shared their individual stories and felt a bit closer to everyone else in the room, I split the participants into pairs to work together on the next phase of the project.

The final part of my workshop began with the following statement and prompt:

The United Nations has recognized you as lead design scientists. We have transported you to the year 2115 and have provided you with the most advanced technology. Please construct tools of mass compassion to send back as gifts for the people of 2015.

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T H ES I S A S A C O - C R E AT I O N WO R KS H O P

“Compassion is the ability to experience hurt as another person, to accept even what you don’t understand, to forgive.”

- RUOXI

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Using glue guns and a curated collection of objects from various 99-cent stores in Brooklyn, the pairs started to dream up solutions. In addition to making physical prototypes, they drew diagrams with notes for future users of their tools.

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T H ES I S A S A C O - C R E AT I O N WO R KS H O P

Team Shai and Lisa created “The Portals�, a quintessential design for the senses. The Portals is a multi-functional tool of empathy that allows you to connect with others by experiencing the world through their senses of sight, sound, and touch.

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Team Ruoxi and Dan explored the role of compassion in public space. They created the “Minute Mask” to address the need for a private moment of grief and as a request for public acceptance and respect. “Communication Consent” is an analog wearable. Ruoxi explained that :

“2015 is a time of both extreme isolation and engagement overflow.

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This tool gives individuals the ability to signal ‘do not disturb’ or ‘talk to me.’

“A Random Fax of Kindness” is a pneumatically powered public installation that shoots positive (and biodegradable) messages into the sky to rain down on unassuming passersby.

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T H ES I S A S A C O - C R E AT I O N WO R KS H O P

Team Katya and Dana explored the role of shelter as compassion. After a really comical prototyping process consisting of breaking and rebuilding the main structure of an umbrella, they created an expandable shelter for displaced people who have no home.

In a closed position the umbrella turns into an improvised green space to show compassion to plants that live in polluted urban environments.

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Alon created the “Compassionate 2000”, a tool for disabling memory and disconnecting us from our prejudices and biases. This ray gun creates an opportunity for us to see the people and the world around us with fresh and non-judgmental eyes. Alon’s second prototype was the “Compassionate XL”. This ray gun allowed those influenced by its rays to see directly through the eyes of another.

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T H E S I S AS A S E RV I C E

Moved by the workshop and my participants’ transition from sharing deeply personal experiences to designing universal solutions, I dreamt up a universal service called S O C I A L MOB. The main spark for this service was lit by one of my favorite books, Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts. Based on a true story, it tells the journey of a man who escaped prison and lived in exile in India for several years. While speaking to his beloved father f igure about the universe and its inf inite complexities on a mountaintop, they began to discuss how to determine good deeds from bad ones. If you do something and are unsure if it is right or wrong, imagine everyone in the world following your lead and infinitely repeating your actions. If it helps the world it is most likely right. But if it harms, then it is most likely wrong.

Inspired by this deceptively simple concept, I began to imagine a reality transformed by individuals whose world reflected and amplified their every action. If we were

to see our decisions played back before us, would this alter our choices in the future?

If we were to witness a seemingly innocent comment negatively affect someone, and see this negative affect ripple through our social network, would we be able to draw a line between moral and immoral, or at least helpful and hurtful?

Tangentially, I was inspired by the work of scientists James Christakis and Nicholas Fowler. 20 Christakis and Fowler study how our social networks inf luence our behaviors. They believe that our individual actions influence not only our friends, but also our friends’ friends, and our friends’ friends’ friends et cetera. How could I turn this invisible network of micro-influences into a more visual spectacle? How could doing good deeds create a ripple effect of kindness? How can seeing our less positive choices magnified impact our future choice to offend or hurt? If social behavior can help us determine positive from negative, how does the absence of society affect that same ability?

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S O C I A L M O B is a service that connects people who feel alone and inconsequential to the impacts even their smallest decisions create. Referencing the joy and delight of Improv Everywhere 21 performances, social mobs would surprise members by organizing families, friends, and strangers to follow them and mimic their actions in public spaces.

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social mob

making waves in social and moral integrit y

for anyone who feels alone and inconsequential

social mob is a social decision making tool that reflec t s our ac tions onto our social net work through organized flash mob p er formances

10:30 AM

social mob create a profile on the social mob app

enter in your b asic information and work /life schedule

10:30 AM

social mob Isioma Iyamah

mon - fri 10am - 6pm

132 West 21st St. N e w Yo r k , N Y 10011

we connec t with your friends , f amily, and s trangers to organize your flash mob

10:30 AM

social mob

then , one day. . .

while you are walking home from work . . .

you b ecome a surprise mob le ader whose ever y ac tion is mimicked

when you get annoyed and yell at a p asserby. . .

we follow suit

when you donate a dollar to a homeless p erson . . .

we donate one too

10:30 AM

social mob share your stor y and inspire others to join the social mob

share your mob leader s tor y online

and join someone else' s social mob

here' s to cre ating surprise public happ enings

that encourage the gif t of social supp or t

T H E S I S AS A N A P P (R O U N D 1)

After playing in the world of universal design experiences, I decided to create a second app, C L E A N S L AT E , for a more specif ic group of unacknowledged people: the prison population. Building upon my prototype R E C I P R O C A L , the game that fosters deep connection through a set of intensifying questions, I began to question how that process could be applied to people in conflict.

Inspired by the “Compassionate 2000” ray gun from the workshop, I tried to imagine how an app could create the space for nonviolent, non-judgmental communication between individuals in conflict with each other.

Another source of inspiration was my interview with Lisa M. Thurau, founder and executive director of Strategies for Youth 22 , a non-profit organization dedicated to facilitating positive and reparative communication between law enforcement and at-risk youth.

Lisa created workshops that include roleplaying activities in which police officers and teenagers switched roles and got to the walk

in each other’s shoes. After initially imagining C L E A N S L AT E as an analog, in-person service to be conducted in prison and mediated by therapists, I decided to challenge myself by imagining it as a digital experience. The app would allow participants to gain an inside look at another person’s struggles and joys before learning their identities or responding from a place of judgment or bias.

For example, it could foster compassionate communication between prisoners and their correctional officers or arresting officers, just before their release. This is an app that references and builds upon an exit interview not as a perfunctory bureaucratic procedure, but as a site of intervention that can replace older prejudices and create an opportunity for fresh perspectives.

I imagine that C L E A N S L AT E will be provided by the prison staff on a smartphone or tablet. In a private room, a prisoner will be prompted to sign up and create a profile with their photo, name, age, and location.

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After they set this up, they can choose to connect with someone they don’t know or someone they do. They would then be provided a chance to write down questions they might want to ask or be asked by this potential stranger/ally. Along with this, the app provides questions that invite the user to share personal experiences, beliefs, and values.

The interaction begins when a scrambled photograph of your partner appears on the screen alongside the fi rst question. As each round of questions is answered by both participants, the participants’ portraits slowly unravel, revealing their identities. The goal of this visual trick is to gradually get a clearer image of your partner; the visual process mirrors the emotional process of gaining a deeper understanding of the person with each question you ask and answer.

Ideally this experience would allow both the prisoner and their guard/officer to develop a compassionate understanding of

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one another’s humanity outside the context of their past confl ict. C L E A N S L AT E aims to open the door to fostering new relationships between unlikely partners.

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T H ES I S A S A N A P P (R O U N D 1)

10:30 AM

T H ES I S A S A N A P P (R O U N D 1)

10:30 AM

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T H ES I S A S A N A P P (R O U N D 1)

10:30 AM

10:30 AM

10:30 AM

10:30 AM

I f yo u c o u l d h a ve

I want to help heal

I f yo u c o u l d g o b a c k

I would go back to

a ny s u p e r p o w e r,

people in pain.

in time, what would

the moment I was

yo u w a n t t o s e e?

arrested.

w h a t w o u l d i t b e?

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T H ES I S A S A N A P P (R O U N D 1)

10:30 AM

T H ES I S A S A N A P P (R O U N D 1)

10:30 AM

10:30 AM

10:30 AM

A d d yo u r o w n questions...

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What is the worst

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I f yo u b e l i eve w e a r e

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my f a m i l y w h i l e I

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yo u ’ ve eve r h a d ?

was growing up.

w h a t i s yo u r c a l l i n g ?

+

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T H ES I S A S A P R O D U CT

T H E S I S AS A P R O D U CT

“The paradox of gift exchange: when the gift is used, it is not used up.

Quite the opposite, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along remains abundant.”

— L E W I S H Y D E , T H E G I F T 23

Returning to creating physical manifestations of my concepts, I worked on designing a product that embodied the spirit of S O C I A L M O B . The S O C I A L M O B C O I N is a token of gratitude that cultivates a network of reciprocity where even the smallest act of kindness is rewarded and passed on. Initially I wanted to assign a currency to these coins as a way of generating “social capital,” but ultimately decided the only reward necessary for doing a good deed is creating a ripple effect of other good deeds.

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T H ES I S A S A P R O D U CT

While conducting expert interviews, I attended a performance called “The Castle” at The Fortune Society, a reentry organization dedicated to “Building People, Not Prisons.” 24 “The Castle” was performed by four formerly incarcerated individuals who had spent a combined 60 years in prison.

They each told the stories of their lives, from childhood through their imprisonment to their introduction to the Fortune Society and the turning point it represented on their paths.

Sitting next to me in the audience was Guy Woodard, who introduced himself before the performance began. Woodard is an artist who had finished his prison sentence a month and a half earlier and arrived at the Fortune Society looking for a place to stay and get back on his feet. Founder David Rothenberg not only gave him a place to stay, but was helping him plan an exhibit to display his highly-detailed and technically spell-binding stippling artwork.

During the performance, I sketched

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portraits of the four performers and wrote down the moving words I heard from each of them. Afterwards, Guy introduced me to them and they each autographed their portraits. Two months passed, and I received a call from Guy inviting me to his exhibit opening. When I arrived, he introduced his friends from the Fortune Society and introduced me as “the girl that drew the portraits.”

Suddenly, everyone was abuzz and enthusiastically asked me to show them my sketches.

I was surprised and flattered. It was soon revealed that Caz, one of the performers that I had drawn, had taken a picture of the sketch and posted it on the organization’s Facebook page. I was so moved by the impression this sketch had made. It was especially impactful as it happened during an existential crisis I was having about where to go next with my thesis.

Reinvigorated, I wanted to capture the power of this interaction in my next product.

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T H ES I S A S A P R O D U CT

A f ter sh a r i n g my ex per ience at Woodard’s exhibit with several close friends in class, my friend Souvik Paul pointed out the power of my portrait offered the gift of being seen and acknowledged. This resonated with what I had heard during several of my expert interviews with art and drama therapists that worked in prisons. After public performances, several inmates from Sing Sing came to Randy Mulder claiming that they “felt like humans again for the first time in a long time.” Using the idea of the portrait as a jumping off point, Souvik reminded me that mug shots are dehumanizing portraits aimed at labeling and stigmatizing people. How could I reinvent the mug shot and create a gift for prisoners?

Dur ing my inter view with Lesley Achitoff, Director of Creative Therapy at Rikers Island, she mentioned running an art therapy class in which she gave her participants three pieces of paper to tape together.

On the first sheet, she asked them to illustrate where they were in that moment. She asked

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T H ES I S A S A P R O D U CT

them to leave the middle piece blank. On the third piece she asked them to illustrate where they would realistically like to be in f ive years. And lastly, their challenge was to come up with a symbolic depiction of the transition from now to then. After speaking to a few more of my amazing classmates ( Jon Lung, Lou van ‘t Riet, Leila Santiago, Judy Chi, Eden Lew, and Chelsea Stewart) about this concept of reinventing mug shots as a means of re-humanizing the prison population, I designed C O N V I C T I O N .

C O N V I C T I O N is a transitional sketchbook that invites the user to share their experiences through storytelling and illustration. The first page holds a letter that I wrote to the user. I introduce myself and make clear that I have no idea what they are going through but that I want to. In an attempt to uplift and empower the reader, I wrote a manifesto that ends with “Here I choose. Here I decide.

Here I fill these pages with my conviction.”

Referencing the mug shot as a tool traditionally intended to label and dehumanize

people, Conviction provides the space for people to fill with their humanity. As the pages progress, the lines that make up the silhouette of a person, on which one is meant to write, gradually fade until the artist/author has full reign of the page.

The goal of these books is to amplify the voices beyond the walls within which they are confined. To give people on the outside who might have some more leverage in determining the future of the criminal justice system, a chance to see into this world and consequently into the lives of these people first-hand.

“Great to work with men who were hungry for skills, experience, and connection. Men, hungry for being seen as something other than their worst mistake.”

— R A N DY M U L D E R , F O R M E R D R A M A T H E R A P I S T, S I N G S I N G P R I S O N

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conviction

T H ES I S A S A P R O D U CT

Sample spreads with gradually fading bars in C O N V I C T I O N sketchbook.

T H ES I S A S A P R O D U CT

T H ES I S A S A P R O D U CT

Sample spreads with gradually fading bars in C O N V I C T I O N sketchbook.

T H ES I S A S A P R O D U CT

T H E S I S AS A CA M PA I G N

In addition to the physical product I imagined S O C I A L M O B as a campaign that crowdsourced social support and the momentum to propel the philosophy of the S O C I A L M O B .

I envisioned a campaign inspired by Candy Chang’s “Before I Die,” 25 a participatory public art project that invited people to contemplate death, reflect on life, and share their personal aspirations in public space. After losing someone she loved, Chang channeled her grief and depression into “Before I Die,” which was mounted in an abandoned house in her New Orleans neighborhood to restore perspective and f ind consolation with her neighbors. She covered the crumbling house with chalkboard paint and stenciled it with the prompt, “Before I die I want to _____.”

The wall quickly filled up with responses, from the poetic to the profound: Before I die I want to... see my daughter graduate, abandon all insecurities, get my wife back, eat all the candy and sushi in the world, be a YouTube sensation, straddle the International Date Line, tell my mother I love her, be completely myself.”

By leveraging Candy Chang’s design language of a public chalkboard, S O C I A L M O B would inspire and encourage the act of asking for help in unlikely places and from unlikely people. By creating prompts such as “I need help with . . . ” and “I’m not sure how to . . . ”, people could fill in trivial or more serious concerns. With another space dedicated to responses with prompts such as “Try this . . . ” or “I think you should . . . ” strangers could respond with advice, ultimately creating an improvised form of street therapy.

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I projected C O N V I C T I O N into the future by imagining a public campaign. I pictured branded merchandise—tote bags printed with “I share my stories so they can share theirs”—would be sold to the public in addition to the sketchbooks in order to crowdsource funding for the production and distribution of these books to prisons, jails, rehabilitation centers, and reentry programs.

Depending on individual approval, the storytellers could choose to have their stories displayed on large billboards.

I envisioned C O N V I C T I O N billboards being produced in partnership with the Fortune Society, the Prison Arts Coalition 26 , and the Inside Out Project 27. The Prison Arts Coalition is a website that creates a network for people involved in the creation of artwork in and around the prison system. The “Inside Out Project” is a world-renowned public art installation project by artist JR, who posts large format portraits of people who are unseen or unheard on the streets of NYC.

Aside from creating art that empowers and gives voice to those behind bars, C O N V I C T I O N aims to change society’s dehumanization of—and stigma associated with—the incarcerated population.

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social support

This section is a combination of writing My project problem statement: about a social good service I designed, new research on the effects of social isolation and Formerly incarcerated individuals suffer exsocial bonds, and, lastly, my preliminary at- treme social loss and have a hard time reintempts at arguing that social support belongs tegrating back into society without the help on the foundational level of human needs on of others.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In his hierarchy, the placement of social benefits appear I learned the term “social loss“ from socloser to the top where psychological needs cial and cognitive neuroscientist Matthew such as love and belonging are addressed and Lieberman’s book Social: Why Our Brains self-actualization is realized. I believe that Are Wired to Connect. Social loss is emotional social support belongs closer to the basic loss—whether it be the loss of a loved one, needs level, seeing as in our society we need rejection by one’s social group, or even the help and trust of others to get access to the distress of separation experienced by basic needs. Much like in a tribe where the young animals. 28 Naomi Eisenberger, a somembers took care of one another, we are cial psychologist (and the wife of Matthew still a tribe only much more disparate and Lieberman) conducted an experiment to sometimes desensitized to the needs of others understand the neurological effect of social who are not in our immediate circle. loss. She writes that “a new brain neuroimaging study (Eisenberger et al.) reveals that the brain areas that are activated during the distress caused by social exclusion are also those activated during physical pain.”29

Image sourced from https://siwdt.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/maslows-hierarchy.jpg 165

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When I first read about the results of this population. As a means of mitigating and/ experiment at the beginning of my thesis or preventing this cycle of social loss, I beexplorations, shortly after reading Daniel gan to wonder how to find opportunities to Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, I began to inject social support, “the delivery (or perconstruct the idea that our social bonds and ceived delivery) of assistance from communilack thereof affect us on mental, emotional, ties, social networks, and confiding partners and physical levels that lead us to potentially in meeting the instrumental and expressive cause social or self harm. I use the term social needs of individuals.”30 harm as a replacement for the word crime since I don’t entirely agree with what today’s my service pitch: criminal justice system constitutes as a crime By creating compassionate social support and as justification for, more often than not, programs for the moment of release, we can cruel and unusual punishment. My definition create widespread empathy for released prisfor social harm is the intent to cause another oners and reduce crime and recidivism. person or group emotional, psychological, This pitch was guided by the extremely and physical pain. disheartening information I discovered when These thoughts led to my interest in researching recidivism. learning about and working with the incarcerated population as they experience a • Over 10,000 ex-prisoners are released from severe social loss, both as a separation from America’s state and federal prisons every family and friends as well as from greater soweek and arrive on the doorsteps of our na ciety. This separation is exacerbated by the tion’s communities. stigmas and stereotypes associated with this • More than 650,000 ex-offenders are re-

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leased from prison every year. Studies show that approximately two-thirds will likely be rearrested within three years of release.31 • People who have been in prison run a higher risk of committing suicide—18 times that of the general population. By far the highest risk of suicide comes in the first months after release.32 After reading several firsthand narratives from prisoners talking about the fear they experienced at the moment of release, I decided to focus on this event as a lever affecting rates of recidivism. According to several stories I read, prisoners without social support networks are sometimes released and have to fend for themselves in regards to finding transportation, housing, food, et cetera. Can you imagine how terrifying it must be to start the journey of returning to a society that will most likely fear or ignore you, all alone? How does this experience affect a person’s access to basic resources and positive reintegration?

My belief is that social support by individuals and organizations dedicated to successful reintegration are the key to improving access to these basic resources, and my hope is to increase the number of people personally invested in this cause.

Lieberman writes in The Atlantic magazine that “social connections are as important to our survival and flourishing as the need for food, safety, and shelter. But over the last fifty years, while society has been growing more and more prosperous and individualistic, our social connections have been dissolving. We volunteer less. We entertain guests at our homes less. And we have fewer and fewer close friends with whom we’d share the intimate details of our lives. We are increasingly denying our social nature, and paying a price for it. Over the same period of time that social isolation has increased, our levels of happiness have gone down, while rates of suicide and depression have multiplied.”33

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So how can people help prisoners feel a sense network of individuals, with and without pasts involving incarceration, who help the of belonging at their moment of release?

I created and iterated on systems map currently incarcerated plan for their first few that explore the role of social support in the days out of prison. A 2008 Urban Institute cycle of incarceration. How does having no policy document advising states on release one to help you gain access to basic resources planning explained, “While a comprehenaffect your chances of successful reintegra- sive, holistic approach to reentry planning tion into society?

— addressing the needs of incarcerated perLeveraging my previous work on Social sons from the moment of admission through Mob together I created a sympathetic plat- the months following release — is clearly the form called Social Boost. Social boost is a ‘gold standard’ toward which the field is promobile networking service. It either brings a gressing, a critical step in this process that has prisoner’s existing network to their moment until now received relatively little attention of release, or orchestrates a group of mentors deals with the preparation of an inmate for consisting of community members, formerly the hours and days immediately following his incarcerated individuals, rehab and/or reen- or her release from prison.”34 try organization employees, and volunteers, “There’s not a lot of literature on this to meet and help the prisoner get basic re- that I’m aware of or perhaps not even enough sources on their path to reintegration within conversation,” said Ann Jacobs, director of society. the Prisoner Reentry Project at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “If you don’t get S O C I A L B O O S T is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping people transition those [first days] right you don’t get a chance out of incarceration. By partnering with to get the rest right.”35 reentry organizations, S O C I A L B O O S T is a

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social boost works like this: • Communicate with people that are currently incarcerated through the Social Boost app(explained in the next chapter) • Plan for the first few days out of prison based on access to basic resources and social support • Pick up from prison at the moment of release • Share a fresh meal with the client • Transport the client home or to a safe housing organization • Offer the newly returned client an opportunity to become a Booster and help others transition out of prison.

Funding for Social Boost will be generated through government grants, private donations, and partnerships with existing reentry organizations.

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Creating compassionate support programs for the moment of release can reduce recidivism.

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social b o o s t

“ I had no clothes . No food. No money. I didn’t get any transpor tation money until . . . like a week later.”

— Adr yann Glenn, f o r m e r p ris o n e r in V irginia

Photograph by Bronson Snelling

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Over 10,000 people are released from jails and prisons ever y week.

“Behind Bars� photgraphy by powelli. Sourced from flickr

Nearly 65% will be rearrested within the first 3 years.

Image sourced from http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2011/08/am-alert-californiaprison-overcrowding-lao.html

People who have been to prison are 18 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population, especially in the first few months af ter release.

“Night� photograph by Alan Markhan, 2009.

“If you don’t get those first days right you don’t get a chance to get the rest right .”

— A nn J acobs , Dire c tor of th e Pris on er Re entr y Proje c t a t J ohn J ay C olle ge of Crimin al J us tice

so cial b o o s t

Social Boost helps prisoners nearing their release date plan for and sur vive their first few hours out .

Still image from “A Ride Home from Prison�, op:docs, nytimes.com

Social Boost is a net work of formerly incarcerated individuals and reentr y organizations dedicated to helping the released reintegrate into societ y.

Cast of “The Castle� with David Rothenberg photograph by Philip Boroff/Bloomberg

Social Boost par tners with local jails/prisons to communicate with inmates nearing their release date.

Photograph by mike koozmin/the s.f. examiner

Social Boost then coordinates with housing organizations across the cit y to secure a safe place for their guest .

Image source scottdavies/fl ickr, cc by-nc.

Social Boost drives and meets their client at their moment of release from prison .

Still image from “A Ride Home from Prison�, op:docs, nytimes.com

Social Boost drivers then take their guest out for their first fresh meal out of prison .

“2 guys eating� at Melrose Diner photograph by Andrew Mitchell

Social boost drops their guest of f at a reentr y housing organization .

Image sourced from fortunesociety.org

Once their clients have had some time to adapt to societ y, Social Boost of fers them a job.

Still image from “A Ride Home from Prison�, op:docs, nytimes.com

Reentry Organizations

Release Planning Differentiation Release Planning during Incarceration

s o cia l b o o s t

Pick up at release from local correctional facility

Pick up from remote correctional facilities

Transitional Housing Assistance

Occupational training and opportunities

Initially S ocial B oos t will receive funding through government grants , private donations and p ar tnering organizations such as The For tune S ociet y, The D o e Fund , The N et work , and The O sborne Asso ciation of NY.

T H E S I S AS A N A P P (R O U N D 2)

S O C I A L B O O S T A P P is a tablet and desktop application that facilitates communication between the S O C I A L B O O S T service and people that are currently incarcerated to plan for their release from prison. Leveraging the recent and increasing implementation of video visitation in prisons across the country, Social Boosters use this app as an efficient and approachable way to make a face-to-face connection with their incarcerated clients.

Before discovering the new utilization of video chats as visitation tools in prisons, I designed several applications for the currently and formerly incarcerated population. My first design intervention was A N O N .T R I B E , a large resource-sharing and social networking platform for formerly incarcerated individuals and employers who are willing to hire ex-convicts. A N O N .T R I B E revolved around my original understanding of anonymity as a tool to protect this vulnerable population from shame and prejudice.

After presenting A N O N .T R I B E , one classmate asked “But why would anyone want to hire an ex-convict?” To which I impulsively responded, “because they are humans!” Later, I regretted having that reaction. I talked to my sister Katya Mezhibovskaya about wishing I had been more calm and had presented a better argument. She told me that “the argument is simple . . . working is a civil right.”

Since that conversation I’ve thought about all the other responses I could’ve had.

Here are a few: What would you have them do? If people who were convicted for a crime served their time in prison and were released, what would it take for you to trust/hire/ house/help/feed them? When do second chances and the benefit of the doubt come into play? Would you prefer that they remain in prison, or live off of government assistance since no one is willing to help them?

Without the help of family, friends, and others, what options are left for people who have been convicted, rightfully or wrongfully?

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These questions triggered my research into current programs and initiatives that aim to help the convicted population become functioning members of society. policy In June of 2015, Mayor de Blasio passed the Fair Chance Act. It made it illegal for the majority of New York City employers to ask applicants about criminal records before making a job offer. In effect, everything from the initial advertisement to the interview questions have been scrubbed of these queries.

Now job applicants can be judged, unbiased, on their own qualifications.”37 moment of release and employment I recently discovered the Anti-Recidivism Coalition in California, which offers a Ride Home program that remarkably similar to my concept for S O C I A L B O O S T . The New York

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Times released an article and video about a formerly incarcerated man who remembers the fear of stepping out into the world after being locked up for a long time.38 He works to help others overcome the fear of those first few moments, hours, and days by picking them up from prison, feeding them, and taking them to a housing facility. At first, I was nervous that an almost identical service to the one I came up already existed. Now I’m glad that this moment is getting attention and I hope my small proposal can scale up to a working service and sustainable business model for the formerly incarcerated.

The Urban Institute’s “Release Planning for Successful Reentry,” which was released in 2008 , outlines the basic needs of people being released from prison and combines surveys and statistics from Departments of Corrections (doc) from 43 different states: “While a comprehensive, holistic approach to reentry planning—addressing the needs of incarcerated persons from the

moment of admission through the months following release—is clearly the “gold standard” towards which the field is progressing, a critical step in this process that has until now received little attention deals with the preparation of an inmate for the hours and days immediately upon his or her release from prison. Without access to food, clothing, shelter, transportation, personal identification, and other key necessities, former inmates may see no other option than to return to illegal activities in order to meet their needs. Thus, corrections agencies must prepare exiting prisoners for this period and work hand-in-hand with community service providers and agencies to ensure that prisoners receive needed resources and guidance after release. These efforts may make the difference between recidivism and successful transition to the community.”39 As research and interviews into current organizations and initiatives concerning the incarcerated continued, I discovered

that transparency is a much more empowering tool than anonymity. Simultaneously, I found a gap in the S O C I A L B O O S T service that could be solved with technology and inprison communication between the service employees, who I am calling Boosters, and the incarcerated. After several iterations, including the transition from a mobile device app to a tablet and desktop version, I experimented with messaging functions and a conversational user interface. Combining these tools, I created the most recent version of the app.

The S O C I A L B O O S T A P P works in partnership with homewav, a service that facilitates Web Access Visitation for Correctional Faci l ities. 4 0 homewav insta l ls stations that consist of a standard phone receiver, Microsoft touchscreen tablet, and a wallmounted metal housing. When prisoners use the homewav station to communicate with their loved ones, they will be able to see advertisements for the S O C I A L B O O S T service.

Once joining, the client can message with

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a Booster in order to set up a time to video chat. Now the Booster and client can enjoy face-to-face communication and plan for the future together. This planning includes discussing release dates and times, client pick-up logistics, choice of a first meal out of prison, and options for safe shelter upon returning to society.

In addition to messaging and video communication, the Social Boost app offers a Conversational User Interface button that helps people lacking in functional and technological literacy by offering audible communication of the application’s functions and information provided on the app. The biggest challenge with creating this application was providing an approachable graphic environment. I wanted the design to be warm and friendly, yet straightforward. After looking at many different reentry websites I decided to focus Social Boost around the color yellow, as it is not only my favorite color, but one that embodies optimism, happiness, and

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friendship. S O C I A L B O O S T would work in concert with existing reentry organizations and initiatives dedicated to improving the lives of the currently and formerly incarcerated.

The Fortune Society currently runs a release-planning program called i-c a n (Individualized Correction Achievement Network) with Rikers Island.41 Yolanda Morales, the Senior Director of Health and Transitional Services and the woman in charge of i-can, talked me through the details of the program, which communicates with the Department of Corrections to assess which inmates have the highest risk of recidivism and would benefit most from being part of the program. The program then offers occupational training and certification to make the transition back to employment smoother. i-can also offers its members a ride back to the Fortune Society. Sometimes, she is able to coordinate for the members’ families to meet them. Otherwise they are driven from Rikers to Fortune, where they are offered

a fresh meal, a kit with basic toiletries and necessities, and given information about how Fortune can help them reintegrate. Morales gave me many insights for improving my S O C I A L B O O S T service, such as considering solutions for users who don’t want to be helped, and other important details I’d missed, such as the necessity of a clean record to drive onto doc grounds. I had originally imagined Social Boost to employ formerly incarcerated drivers but then realized I could send these drivers to remote prisons where no verification is necessary for pick-up.

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T H E S I S AS A F U T U R E U TO P I A /DYSTO P I A

As part of Sinclair Smith’s Product Futuring class, we projected ourselves into dystopias and utopias as seen through the lenses of our theses. We wrote stories imagining these futures and designed products that built off of those realities. I had a much easier time imagining dystopias, so I wrote a story in which the entire physical prison experience is maintained through mandatory solitary confinement and all social ties are broken with the outside world. Unbeknownst to the public, prisoners, who are seen as expendable, are replacing soldiers in the military. If they survive the battleground, they can come back to society and work as police to select more and more to take their place on the battleground.

The story follows public service announcements made by the American Commanderin-Chief in the 2060’s and 2070’s. The other side of the story is told through journal entries by James, a prisoner who is starting to forget what his wife and son look like, and is gradually losing his humanity.

The utopia I imagined is a much less compelling story, but introduces the act of doing taxes as a way to support specific causes as opposed to blindly giving money to the government, unaware of which social services that money supports. The story covers a dialogue between husband and wife debating which prison program they will donate their criminal justice fee towards. They debate between sending their tax money to an inprison business start-up program or taking on a more involved role in the life of a prisoner.

By choosing the second option, Monika and Dwayne can start communicating with an inmate, set aside money, and take them in upon release, establishing a network of individuals who create social support for those who lack it. The saved tax money then goes to the released prisoner to help them get on their feet upon reentering back into society.

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T H ES I S A S A F U T U R E DYS TO P I A

THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA

december 15th, 2062

FOR M ER COLLE AGU ES WILL BE R EUNITED WITH

March 9th, 2075

december 12th, 2075

There were 24 of us out there today. They’re sending 16 and 17-year-olds now. It’s my second mission with these little ones and I can’t imagine how they’re holding up. Jesse should be about that age now. I wonder what he would think if he saw us out there today. It was raining but the old timers didn’t seem to notice. We fought for almost 9 hours.

13 dead. 1 woman. She looked about 40.

I’ll be 40 soon. I wonder if they remember.

I wish I knew their names. I guess it wouldn’t matter. It’s only a day, and then it starts all over. Never long enough to make a friend outside of someone you simply hope won’t be shot. I wonder when it will end.

2,334 days. 118 dead. 14 scars. 2 bullets.

3,141 days left. Hopefully. What will they think? How could I tell them? Shit, that’s if I make it in the first place.

Jesse was 10. Ella came that day. They said it would be alright. 3,141 days left.

the reform program is pleased to announce the lowest prisoner return rates of the decade. the prison population has also dropped down to 3.9 million since the implementation of the new reform in 2063. solitude, isolation from distractions, and hands-on lifeskills training have produced results greater than we could have expected. psychological rehabilitation is in full effect. expect your loved ones to return with the utmost moral rectitude. for those of you that have reunited upon release from your sentence, we honor your service and dedication to keeping the nation’s streets crime-free. we appreciate your ongoing support for the program.

PRISONERS UPON COMPLETION OF THEIR SENTENCE .

the united states of america is proud to announce the latest update on prison reform. for many decades now the country has been struggling to alleviate the pain caused by increased inmate recidivism. of the 4.6 million convicts in prisons and jails across the country, nearly 75% finish their sentences, commit heinous crimes against society, and are once again imprisoned. according to the latest neurological studies from globalabs, social interaction is the largest factor in criminality. in an effort to redeem the sanctity of a society in which our children can go to sleep without a fear in the world, we have passed several new social safety measures that will take effect on monday, january 1st, 2063. the changes are as follows: COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND

NOTIFICATION OF EXTENDED SENTENCES WILL BE COMMUNICATED VIA PRISON WARDENS AND CFO’S IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN ABSOLUTE AUTHENTICITY AND SECURITY. PLEASE BE ASSURED THAT COMPLETE REHABILITATION IS GUARANTEED. UPON RETURN TO GR E ATE R SOCIETY, TH E FOR M E R LY IMPR IS ONED WILL BE THEIR BEST, MOST DOCILE SELVES .

ALL PERSONAL ITEMS WILL BE REDISTRIBUTED TO THE APPROPRIATE FAMILY MEMBERS AND FRIENDS OF PRISONERS IN ORDER TO UPHOLD THE LATEST DISCOMMUNICATION EFFORTS.

we understand that this may come as a shock to some of you so we have allowed limited visitation hours and telemessaging for the following two weeks.

God Bless America.

Solitude Towards Rectitude.

THE PRISON POPULATION, FOR THE DURATION OF

John Traynor,

THE PRISONER’S SENTENCE , WILL BE TERMINATED

commander-in-chief, united states of america

INDEFINITELY. FAMILY, FRIENDS, LOVED ONES, AND

Forgo The Past. Forge The Future.

John Traynor, commander-in-chief, united states of america

James 2-233-924 226

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T H ES I S A S A F U T U R E DYS TO P I A

February 9th, 2076

may 12th, 2076

November 9th, 2076

I had a dream about you Ella. It’s been too long. It’s strange how I forget sometimes.

It’s almost hard to remember your face, and Jesse’s face too. I hope you haven’t forgotten me. I’m losing myself out here but in ways I cant explain. There are these moments of clarity when you come into focus but the rest of the time it’s just death and concrete. How can they make anyone live like this?

confidential telemessage to douglas decoupe, general, united states army

This doesn’t make sense. How can I get a message out? Ella, I love you.

James 2-233-924

*

i’m waiting on your numbers. the public has been made aware of the decreases in recidivism, but that was nearly six months ago. i need to know what i can report on. take it easy on the younger ones; we will need them when they return. as for the old timers, let them be. it’s only a matter of time for them.

dose*

I’m fine. Everything’s ok.

James 2-233-924

REPORT BACK AS SOON AS POSSIBLE .

John Traynor, commander-in–chief, united states of america

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T H ES I S A S A F U T U R E U TO P I A

R E S TA R T U P

Monika, have you done them yet?

Huh, I heard differently. Apparently we can waive the prison tax if we invest in a prisoner.

That’ll be almost 800 dollars!

Done what yet?

Like adoption?

Your taxes.

Sort of. The way I heard, the irs waives the fee if you register and search through the inmate profiles and find someone to maintain contact with and take in after their sentence.

Depending on their time, we could save more than enough to get someone back on their feet.

December 23rd, 2075

No, why? I’ve got two months left.

They passed the new Tax Reform policy and we’ve got to choose where the money’s going now.

get put on a track to hone your skills in team management and logistics. Only the end goal is community-specific. Sure you might have to be transferred across the country depending on the program but they’re putting purpose back into the prison system, not just punitive measures. And the inmates can change tracks if it doesn’t suit them, like changing a major in college. Apparently one prison got every other prison in the country to go green after an initial pilot facility. How can you argue with zero waste-prisons?

What do you think we should do?

What do you mean?

Well the government’s been implementing all sorts of new transparency standards. With the new prison educational and vocational changes, we get to choose where our yearly contribution goes in the system. There are over 100 options, so we need some time to go over the new initiatives around the state and the country.

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That’s if they even need help with these new programs. We’ve been receiving and reviewing a ton of really innovative co-operative business models at the office, and they were created by teams of inmates. It’s pretty brilliant. Basically when you get locked up, depending on the offense, the review board and inmate advisor reappropriate the skills you have and funnel them into an incubator program. Say you go in for drug dealing. You

Are you saying you want to adopt a grown man or woman?

Maybe. Why don’t you find someone on the teams you mentioned sending business models and see if we can help them?

But they won’t be a stranger! That’s the point, right? You have to maintain contact for the duration of their whole sentence. They can choose too, you know. Who knows, we might not be the best investment for them, whoever they are. Plus they might have a family to go home to, so then we would just be there for social and financial support. And if they have no one, then we’re here for them.

Apparently the president thinks it’s going to cut inmate recidivism by 70 - 80% by 2078.

It makes sense. I was just sort of hoping we could go the desk research route instead of rearranging our entire life.

Come on Dwayne, it’s social services for the public, and now by the public. That’s a pretty brilliant co-operative model if you ask me.

The house is paid for and the kids are fine.

We can afford this and that wasn’t always the case, but we got help didn’t we?

Do we know anyone that’s done it yet? I’m a little nervous about having a stranger here.

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Shit, you got me on that one. ok let’s look into it. I’ll ask around at work and see if anyone has agreed to take someone in yet.

And if not, someone’s gotta go first, right?

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In addition, to writing dystopian and utopian stories, each of us chose one future and created a speculative newspaper and product for that time. I chose to design through my dystopian lens.

In 2075 The New York Times headlines highlight drastic mishaps in science, everworsening climate change consequences, constant economic crashes, and an upcoming election that breeds support for harsher punishment of the incarcerated. Social contact between prisoners and the free world is deemed illegal, solitary conf inement is mandatory, and unbeknownst to the public, prisoners are forced to serve as soldiers in the military. Where minutes, days, and weeks pass inconsiderate of the breaking of the human spirit that lacks love and acknowledgment, D O S E is a government-issued tool for tracking time and numbing physical and emotional pain. D O S E is an identification bracelet, calendar, and medication injection device designed for the prison population

of 2064. The calendar face consists of three concentric rings with 60 marks, indicating days past, moving past one another without any hierarchy. Slowly prisoners lose all sense of time while locked up and shift between periods of warfare and time spent encaged in concrete and steel solitude. D O S E administers a small portion of painkillers, triggered by a central button on the watch face, for healing physical and emotional pain. Every time a prisoner feels nostalgic they dose themselves and gradually numb their socioemotional ties to loved ones. Mirroring the efforts of disconnection prescribed in prison, Globalabs, the pharmaceutical conglomerate, is selling a quick-fix cure to emotional distress and effectively numbing civilization of social bonds.

I created D O S E as an antithetical product exploration for a dystopian future—a future in which prisoners are treated as slaves to the state and played like pawns by the American government and military.

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T H ES I S A S A F U T U R E U TO P I A /DYS TO P I A

Where prisoners are treated as consumable duly convicted, shall exist within the United on a level previously unfathomable. Dose States, or any place subject to their jurisdicwas inspired by multiple findings, the first tion.” Simply put: Incarcerated persons have from the study measuring the effects of ex- no constitutional rights in this arena; they clusion and isolation on the brain by Naomi can be forced to work as punishment for their crimes.”1 Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman42.

Another source of inspiration was the — Whitney Benns, The Atlantic Magazine way in which we currently employ inmates.

“American Slavery, Reinvented”43 In prisons, inmates are required to work but make only a few pennies an hour. According to my interview with Kandra Clark, women can make up to 25 cents an hour and men can make up to 75 cents.

I discovered that some jobs inmates are required to work in are dangerous; since they are mandatory, the system has disturbing echoes of slavery.

“In the shining promise of freedom that was the Thirteenth Amendment, a sharp exception was carved out. Section 1 of the Amendment provides: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been

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.75” DIA

.125”

.75” DIA .375” DIA

1.625”

.125”

.375”.125” DIA

.125” DIA 1.625”

.75” .75”DIA DIA .375” DIA

1.75” DIA

Dose Dose

.375”

.375” .375” Scale: 1”= 1”

Scale: 1”= 1”

Scale: Scale:1”= 1”=1”1”

3DPD2 Sinclair Smith

3DPD2 Sinclair Smith

3DPD2 3DPD2 Sinclair SinclairSmith Smith

Notes: 1.75” 1.75”

Notes:

Notes: Notes:

Dose body is made .3125” from black and clear acrylic with a Low Ethanol Polyethylene .5” DIA.05625” .05625” button.

Dose body is made .3125” .3125” from black and clear acrylic with a Low .75” DIA Ethanol Polyethylene .5” .5”DIA DIA button.

Dose Dosebody bodyisismade made from fromblack blackand andclear clear acrylic acrylicwith withaaLow Low DIA Ethanol Ethanol.375” Polyethylene Polyethylene button. button.

.125” .125”DIA DIA

1.75” 1.75”DIA DIA

.125” DIA

.125” DIA

.125” .125”DIA DIA

1.75”

1.75” .3125” .5” DIA .05625”

.05625”

8” 8”

8”

Top

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Dose

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1.75” DIA

8”

Dose

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.375” .375”DIA DIA

4.625” 4.625”

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.125” DIA

.125” DIA

Dose strap is made from 1/8” thick genuine 1.625” black leather.

Top TopDose strap is made from 1/8” thick genuine black leather.

Inmate ID number is laser etched in leather.

Inmate ID number is laser etched in leather.

Inmate InmateID IDnumber numberisis laser laseretched etched.125” in inleather. leather.

DIA

January 1st, 2063

January January1st, 1st,2063 2063

1.75” DIA

Dose Dosestrap strapisismade made from from1/8” 1/8”thick thickgenuine genuine black blackleather. leather.

.125” .125”DIA DIA

.375”

.375”

.375” .375”

8” Front

Front Back

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BackFront Front

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January 1st, 2063

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DOSE

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O B J E C T I O N S is a collection of gavels made out of unusual materials, designed to make judges pause when doling out life-altering decisions in the courtroom. In creating this series of objects, I wanted to focus on the single moment that follows a sentencing, when the judge slams down his/her gavel, creating an indelible mark on the defendant’s life, and the life of their loved ones, forever. By altering the materials and interactions around the gavel, I hoped to introduce a moment of introspection and reflection in what is otherwise merely “business as usual.” The prototypes experimented with a variety of materials within the constraints of a recognizable and iconic form. Instead of making the entire gavel out of hardwood, I alternated making the handle of the gavel out of wood, construction foam, and steel. The juxtaposition of permanence and impermanence symbolized the disparity between the experiences of the sentencer and the sentencee in the courtroom.

There were unforeseen, yet fitting consequences of the material decisions that I made: a gavel with a head made of wood and steel and a staff made of blue foam sagged and was rendered unusable; a gavel made with the opposite combination of materials softened the harshness of the judge’s actions, the blue foam absorbing much of the impact, creating an experience that was at once overly permissive with regards to the input of force (by cushioning the blow) and condescending and patronizing for the judge at the same time (by softening the blow); a gavel filled with steel rods lent a weight to the gavel that made it almost impossible to use, forcing the judge to exert considerable effort when making an indelible impact on a person’s life. By making the sentencing process more difficult, and by requiring more physical effort to sentence someone, I hoped to make the relationship between the judge and the defendant more equitable. Through this prototype, I sought to introduce reluctance to the criminal

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justice system and to reduce the bureaucratic desensitization that is too prevalent in modern courts. I experimented with hiding magnets in the gavel’s head and the gavel’s base, making it impossible to lift or strike the gavel at all. Only with contemplative thought and concerted effort sufficient to counteract the magnetic field of the magnets could the judge deliver a sentencing.

The next prototype that I made explored choice in the judge’s decision to sentence. The gavel head that I made had several holes that a handle could be screwed into, dramatically altering the balance of the overall gavel. I wanted to recognize the judge’s role in a jury trial. While the jury determines guilt, it is up to the judge to determine sentencing. By choosing to screw the handle into different positions in the head, the judge explicitly makes a choice about the type of sentence that he or she is doling out. This choice could be expressed in different ways through the prototype: if a decision seems obvious to a judge, he could choose to shift the balance

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of the gavel weight towards the front, making it easy to lift and strike the gavel, symbolic of how clear cut the case is. On the other hand, the judge could also make the gavel difficult to lift and strike, in order to suggest that for such a case, the ease of sentencing offsets or counteracts the ease of the gavel strike. I wanted to introduce contemplation and pause in sentencing, and imagined that a judge would have to decide how he wanted to assemble the gavel for every case in order to reflect on the case at hand.

The final form was inspired by a classmate’s recollection of Turkey’s former capital punishment procedures (it has since been abolished). When sentencing a prisoner to death, Turkish judges would break the writing instrument used to sign someone’s life away.44 I was moved by this gesture as I believe it was meant to symbolize the individualized attention paid to each case and also to mirror the destruction caused to the sentencee. This gavel was made entirely of concrete and intended to be for one-time

use. After declaring a verdict and striking the gavel, the gavel head will break. This would represent the simultaneous fragility and permanence of sentencing someone to life in prison. The use of this gavel in the court room is intended to symbolize the structural flaws in a criminal justice system that executes one innocent person out of every 9 people sentenced to death(aforementioned words of Bryan Stevenson).

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OBJECTIONS

process

T H ES I S A S A S P EC U L AT I V E P R O D U CT

T H ES I S A S A S P EC U L AT I V E P R O D U CT

Final O B J E C T I O N G AV E L 250

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C H R O N I C L E is a contraband voice recorder marketed and produced under the disguise of a digital radio. Influenced by the current product design of correctional products sold in prison commissaries, C H R O N I C L E is an entirely transparent radio (voice recorder). The purpose of transparent technology in prisons is to make sure no drugs or other paraphernalia are smuggled into prisons. C H R O N I C L E subverts the literal language of transparency intended to be smuggled into prisons as a tool for self-expression covert recording of abusive correctional officers.

C H R O N I C L E was inspired by two interviews I had with people who were formerly incarcerated. When speaking about correctional officers, L said “They are in the best position to rehabs these guys but don’t. These guys are dirty. If they got caught they’d be in jail themselves.” He was referring to his theory that the drugs constantly being found by officers during middle-of-the-night checks were actually being smuggled in by the correctional officers themselves.

The other interview that helped influenced the creation of C H R O N I C L E was with ROy Waterman, who said, “ I didn’t write for myself but I wish I had. I’ve lived three life times. I’ll write a book some day.”

This tool is meant to encourage someone in prison not to lose their voice despite the constant suppression of it. While researching the use of recording devices in correctional facilities I found the “Storybook Project”1, which brings children’s books and voice recorders to incarcerated parents and allows them to record their voices reading stories for their children. This is just one of the possible uses for C H R O N I C L E . I hope it serves as a chance for people to speak their minds both about their internal states during incarceration as well as an opportunity to expose unjust treatment of prisoners by correctional officers.

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Google image search for transparent electronic devices sold to prisons

2“

1.1875 “

.25” RAD

2“

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.125” RAD

.125” RAD

Conviction Radio Scale: 1”= 1”

.7962” DIA

3DPD2 Marianna Mezhibovskaya kaya

.2798” DIA 4”

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Notes:

1” DIA

Injection molded pieces

1.5“ .125“

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4” 3.125”

April 1st, 2016

T H ES I S A S A M A R K E TA B L E P R O D U CT

T H ES I S A S A M A R K E TA B L E P R O D U CT

CHRONICLE

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prototype (previously called Conviction) 259

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THIS IS WHO I AM

T H E S I S AS A N E X P E R I E N C E

As part of Emilie Baltz’s Design Delight class, I was asked to choose one adjective that I wanted my thesis to feel like. I chose the word “inviting.” Next I was to design and demonstrate a walk on the street that expressed that word to my class, after which they would follow me and recreate the walk twenty-fold. I quickly realized that this class exercise was very similar to the multiplying effect I had imagined for S O C I A L M O B . For my walk I would step up to a stranger, extend a hand, if they chose to engage, I would twirl them and gracefully motion for them to continue on their way. This experiment worked both with the class and with a few strangers who seemed delighted to be twirled.

I began designing an experience that emphasized the core of my thesis and would feel ‘inviting.’ After several iterations—including a strange event that featured paint, choreography, and conversations about exclusion, and another idea that reimagined the struggles of reentry as an “Escape the Room”

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style game for the public to understand how hard it is to find basic resources—I revisited the C O N V I C T I O N sketchbooks.

I imagined a gallery space in which you enter in order to have a conversation with a stranger inspired by the environment when making a phone call in prison. Unbeknownst to you, the stranger you are speaking with is an inmate at a local jail or prison and is aware they are talking to someone outside of their situation. I imagined this half-gallery, halfcall center to be a place of anonymity and acceptance. A place where strangers could have a conversation about what they might share in common, asking one another questions that dig deep into who we are and what we believe without the triviality of asking about what one does for a living, and where one lives and what they pay for rent in this expensive city.

I began crafting a story around this event titled “For Quality Purposes . . . ,” much like the phrase you would hear before being

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informed your phone call might be recorded.

The multiple moving parts for this event included setting up phone booths in a gallery space, partnering with a local correctional facility, finding a liaison at the facility who could help find inmates interested in participating, designing instructions for this experience and making sure everyone involved is mentally and emotionally safe and cared for before, during, and after the interaction.

I quickly confronted difficult questions when proposing this event: • How do I indirectly facilitate a conversation between two strangers (one person in prison or jail and one outside of it)?

• How do I schedule and guarantee a calling \ cue at a local correctional facility considering the possibility of unforeseen and schedule-altering circumstances like lockdowns?

• How do I make sure both participants don’t offend one another while maintaining anonymity?

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At this point in my thesis I was very convinced that anonymity was the best way to blend together two populations in conflict, to disrupt prejudice and find alternative ways of communication that built upon empathy and compassion. Thanks to the feedback from my professor, Emilie Baltz, and classmates, as well as my recent interview with Yolanda Morales, I realized how much more impactful and empowering transparency could be.

This is where the design of the event shifted into an interactive gallery that would display the work of people who are currently incarcerated. The interactive element was the ability for gallery-goers to view the artwork and respond to the artists and authors who couldn’t be present.

I reached out to Lesley Achitoff and met with her to discuss the possibility of giving several C O N V I C T I O N sketchbooks to the groups she works with at Rikers Island. She was immediately moved by the book, which was a huge relief to me. I then proposed the

idea for a gallery exhibit showcasing the stories and illustrations in the books. In addition to seeing these pieces in a gallery I wanted to give the viewers a chance to respond and send support to the participants in this project at Rikers. I started by designing and prototyping a gallery wall layout where people could see a scanned and framed page from one of the sketchbooks and then write a message on a postcard for Achitoff and myself to deliver back to the participant.

The feedback I got from this first attempt was that it would be helpful to see what other people had written and to have some sort of prompt to encourage writing. I redesigned the experience to incorporate shelving on the walls of the gallery to hold postcards.

This way I could make the gallery walls come to life, forming a tapestry of support around the artwork by people that couldn’t be in the space with us. Then came several weeks of nerves about Rikers approving this gallery proposal. I worked closely with Achitoff,

who informed me that her groups were enjoying filling out the books. If nothing else, I was proud to have gotten a product I designed out into the real world and into the hands of the people it was intended for. After a nerve-wracking few weeks of booking a gallery space, planning, and prototyping the layout, Achitoff emailed me that we got approval!

The backup plan would still have incorporated the interactive element of an audience responding to the artist; only this plan had no artist. I would build out the gallery similar to its original design, but instead of scanned C O N V I C T I O N pages, there would be jarring facts and stories about the state of people that are currently incarcerated. Ideally, the shocking numbers and words would facilitate the impulse to send messages of support to inmates unknown to the gallery-goers.

But the backup plan wasn’t necessary because Rikers approved the C O N V I C T I O N exhibit. Throughout those anxious weeks I kept

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T H ES I S A S A N E X P E R I E N C E

Lesley Achitoff and I at the Conviction Gallery on March 26th, 2016.

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up correspondence with Achitoff and found out that her participants, mainly women and adolescent boys, were enjoying the books.

One woman even said she would like to continue filling them in for the rest of her life. I was so glad the books were well received and was eager to see the content the participants created.

I booked a gallery space for my event at the Con Artist Collective.1 (Yes, the name is ironic.) The space was perfect: a small 250 -square foot gallery on Ludlow, a busy street on the Lower East Side in New York City. The gallery faces the street and behind the exhibit space is a co-working space for over 500 artists who are contributing members to the collective. I was excited by the communal vibe and the opportunity for attracting passersby on the street. Now all that was left was to design, build, and install the gallery.

With the help of my fantastic friends and classmates Jon, Eden, Natsuki, and Souvik, I

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built and painted the art frames and postcard display shelves. The day of the event I had the help of Eden Lew’s boyfriend Calvin Szeto and my sister’s husband Dan Bina with install, Chelsea Stewart with videography, Souvik Paul with photography, my sister Katya Mezhibovskaya with install and fulf illing the role of Social Media Queen during the event; my parents with food, drinks, transportation, and general emotional support and crisis aversion. As for the actual exhibit I had Jon Lung and Natsuki Hayashi play the role s of hosts and greeters also helping people look through the books.

I got the sketchbooks back three days before my event. I was overwhelmed with the stories, drawings, colors, and collages. The books I displayed in the exhibit were filled in by eight women and two adolescent boys.

Each participant chose which spread they wanted to be shown, while two of the artists allowed for their entire books to be viewed.

In an effort to respect and preserve the books,

which the participants wanted back as soon as the event was over, I had Jon and Natsuki wear white gloves as they presented the pages, effectively elevating the work to its appropriate art level. Because of the intimate nature of the stories, we all discovered it was more successful to give the white gloves to the visitor who wanted a closer look. Nervous at first, I was delighted to find the visitors were very careful with the books The event took place on Saturday, March 26th, 2016 from 5-8pm. The event title and description were as follows: CO NVI CTI O N : AN I NTE R ACTIVE GALLE RY

A collection of stories and drawings by people who are currently incarcerated and a chance for you to respond.

You might think three hours is not a long time, but it was incredible how many people showed up and how many moving

conversations were had. Friends and family with varying knowledge of my thesis topic came and took their time reading the stories and writing responses. Many people whom I had never met came from the Fortune Society. Many people who were simply walking by came in and joined in the showing of support for this invisible group of artists.

Lesley Achitoff came and was as grateful to me as I was to her for making this experience possible. Despite the somber topic, the mood in the gallery was uplifting. Everyone who came found at least one story they could relate to. The postcards I designed had prompts on the front in the event that people didn’t know what to write in response to the work.

The prompts were: Thank you for sharing . . .

This reminded me of a time when. . .

I hope some day . . .

Here is my story . . .

My name is . . .

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T H ES I S A S A N E X P E R I E N C E

The goal with creating these prompts was to remind everyone that, above all, they were responding to people. Rather than stress over the fact that their situations were drastically different, they could instead find common ground. Some people created drawings in response. Others wrote wishes for the futures of the struggling artists. Others simply wrote compliments about the work. Overall, it was a huge show of acknowledgment and appreciation.

At the end of the event, Lesley and I collected all of the postcards and placed them inside the sketchbooks they were addressed to. The frames and shelves were taken down.

The food was packed up. And just like that, the event space was reset to a clean and quiet white gallery despite the colorful and emotionally charged evening that had transpired only moments before.

The following pages show the pages of the sketchbooks that were on display at the event and photographs of the event itself.

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first page of C O N V I C T I O N

second page of C O N V I C T I O N

third page of C O N V I C T I O N

third page of C O N V I C T I O N

work by: A N T O I N E T TA B A L D A S S A R R E

work by: B I B I K H A N

work by: D AW N M C I N T O S H

work by: D . G .

work by: G E R A L D I N E S M I T H

work by: S H A R D A R A M N A N A N

work by: J E A N J I M E N E Z

work by: J E S S I C A C O P E L A N D

work by: J E S S I C A C O P E L A N D

work by: M A S H R U F H O S S A I N

work by: N A K E M A M C D O N A L D

T H ES I S A S A N E X P E R I E N C E

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After the C O N V I C T I O N exhibit, I sent Lesley Achitoff a short questionnaire to pass along to the artists and authors. I wanted their feedback on the whole experience: starting with receiving the C O N V I C T I O N sketchbooks, filling them out, sharing their work in a public gallery, and receiving responses from complete strangers. Below are the questions I asked on the questionnaire: “Dear Reader,

What part of the sketchbook did you like the most/least?

Is there anything I could change to improve the books?

How did you feel about showing the work in a public gallery?

How did you feel getting responses to your stories?

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and stories in the Conviction Sketchbooks. I hope to meet you some day soon but in the meantime I would love to know how you felt about the books, about sharing your work in a public gallery, and how you felt about getting responses to your work.

Would you want to show your work again in the future?

What was your first reaction to the Conviction sketchbooks?

The feedback was very gratifying. The next spread shows some excerpts from the responses.

Would you use a longer version of this book as a journal?

Would you like to write anything else about this experience?�

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THIS IS MY HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

T H I S I S M Y H O P E FO R T H E F U T U R E

My hope for the future of this thesis work is to continue to shift negative public perception around the largely unseen and unheard incarcerated population. I hope this shift in perception inspires more people to get involved in this cause and results in an increased rate of successful reintegration into society. I hope this increased social investment into the lives of those involved in criminal justice will result in less crime, both against others and against oneself. I would like to imagine a more harmonious society that feels personally invested in the struggles of others as opposed to putting up walls and becoming desensitized to them.

Politically, I hope that this new awareness of injustice will solicit increased support for prison reform and provoke the creation of more policies dedicated to reentry and fair treatment of the formerly incarcerated.

From an economic standpoint, I hope that the tax money dedicated to keeping prisons running will begin to shift more towards successful reentry organizations and transitional

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employment and housing initiatives due to a decreased number of people going to prison.

I hope that more money will be dedicated to the improvement of communities where incarceration is prevalent as opposed to increased spending on supporting people in punitive and not rehabilitative prisons and jails.

I hope that more attention will be paid to the causes of crimes as opposed to only the punishment for them. I hope sentences for non-violent offenses such as drug-related ones are decreased in time and severity or entirely eliminated as a result of more programs that facilitate alternatives to incarceration. I hope that more attention is paid to the amount of people who suffer from mental illness during their crimes, during their incarcerations, and as a result of their incarcerations. I hope this thesis inspires engagement between people that have never been incarcerated and those that have been so as to spread a wider and deeper understanding of the causes and results of an unjust criminal justice system.

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All of this work would not have been possible without the support of my family, friends, and teachers.

Mama and Papa, thank you for all of the emotional, financial, transportational, nutritional, and motivational support. I would not have survived the last two years without the constant hugs, love, and putting out of emergencies.

Benjam in Flint thank you for wading through the mud with me. You have been there for me through thick and thin and I will never be able to thank you enough for all of the love, bubbly water, cookies, laundry, wake-up calls, hugs, kisses, and every other kind of support there is in this life.

Katya and Dan thanks for endless design, engineering, install, social media, and emotional support. Thank you for sleepovers and breakfasts, and saving me from Jasper! Thank you for having faith in this thesis when I didn’t.

Jon, seeing as we are the same person you probably know what I’m saying as I write it.

Thank you for always being there even when I wanted you to go home and sleep. When the zombie apocalypse starts, we will fight side by side. Ride or Die. Souvik thank you so much for your friendship and guidance in the last two years.

Thanks for inspiring and helping to improve a lot of my work throughout grad school.

Remember, when you run for President, I will be your campaign manager.

Eden thank you for the most incredible scavenger hunt birthday gift and for triggering the creation of the cmmttee. Thank you for absurd love of food and for starting the TACOmmittee as well! I can’t wait to see what we create together in the future.

Natsuki thank you for your friendship, for your meticulous craftsmanship, for the cmmttee, and for having the cleanest hands

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in New York City! I can’t wait to see what we create together in the future!

Leila thank you for your friendship and for helping me choose the name Conviction for my product and for helping me with the original design language of the sketchbook.

I’ll never forget when we drove to Coney Island! “STOP THE CAR” Chelsea thank you so much for your friendship, amazing design skills, hilarious stream of curses, and for cover ing the whole Conviction event on video. I’m sorry about you hitting your head at the gallery. I heard it was pretty rough.

Lou, girl I don’t know what to say... Fa. I love you and am so thankful for your friendship, sleep overs, conversations, and awesomeness.

Adem, thank you for your friendship, kindness, humility, and the Ottoman slap. I will remember your coffee cup and plate for 40 yrs.

CLASS OF 2016

TE AC H E RS

Thank you to the rest of my fantastic classmates who I am so sad to be ending an intense 2 year relationship with.

T H A N K YO U TO A L L A N C H O C H I N OV W H O S E R E -

R AC H E L AB R AM S

L E N T L E S S FA I T H A N D S U P P O R T I N H I S S T U D E N T S ,

N ATA L I E B A LT H R O P A N D M A N U E L T O S C A N O

I S R E S P O N S I B LE FO R M Y CO M I N G TO A N D LOV-

KYLA FULLNENWIDER

I N G T H I S P R O G R A M . T H A N K YO U F O R P U T T I N G

J E N VA N D E R M E E R A N D R E B E C C A S I LV E R

TOGETHER THIS KILLER LIST OF TEACHERS,

J O H A N L I D E N A N D R I N AT A R U H

FRIENDS, AND MENTORS.

E M I L I E B A LT Z

Judy Chi Adam Fujita Oscar De La Hera Gomez Wan Jung Hung Natsuki Hayashi Isioma Iyamah Panisa Khunprasert Eden Lew Jon Lung Adem Önalan Tahnee Pantig Souvik Paul Ziyun Qi Roya Ramezani Lou van ‘t Riet Leila Santiago Chelsea Stewart Belen Tenorio Lijia Yang

BRENT ARNOLD SINCLAIR SMITH

STEVEN DEAN

K AT E B A K E W E L L A N D C L A I R E H A R T T E N

JAN NA GILBE RT

BE NJAM IN CRITTON BECKY STERN

A N D T H A N K YO U T O T H E I N C R E D I B L E P R O G R A M

R I C H A R D T YSO N A N D JA M E S W YN N

S TA F F W H O W E R E F R I E N D S , M E N T O R S , A N D

S A R A H L I D G U S A N D L AW R E N C E A B R A H A M S O N

TE AC H E RS AS WE LL .

JASON SEVE RS TED ULLRICH AND PEPIN GELARDI

GAB R I E LLE KE LLN E R

AY S E B I R S E L

ALISHA WESSLER

PA O L A A N T O N E L L I

M A R KO M A N R I Q U E Z

R O B WA L K E R MICHAEL CHUNG S I G I M O E S L I N G E R A N D M A S A M I C H I U D A G AWA ANDREW DENT A M Y W H I TA K E R AN DREW SCH LOSS

323

E N D N OTE S A N D B I B LI O G R A P H Y

The following citations comprise the majority of research I did throughout the thesis year.

The endnotes are set in mla format. The bibliography is also comprised of mla format citations and sorted into books, articles, videos, and organizations/websites. As much insight as I was able to glean from these sources, the most qualitative and influential insights came from the countless conversations I had with people mentioned in the book.

325

E N D N OT E S

1

Patokos, Tassos. Internal Game Theory. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

2

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. N.p.: Macmillan, n.d. Print.

3

Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam, 1995. Print.

Lieberman, Matthew. “The Social Brain and Its Superpowers”Tedxtalks.ted.com. ted, 9 Oct. 2013. Web. <http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-Social-Brain-And-Its-Superp>.

4

Lieberman, Matthew D. Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. New York: Penguin Random House, 2013. Print.

5

Rothenberg, David. Fortune in My Eyes: A Memoir of Broadway Glamour, Social Justice, and Political Passion. Milwaukee: Applause, 2012. Print.

6

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. New York: Penguin Random House, 2014. Print.

7

Stevenson, Bryan.“We Need to Talk about an Injustice.”TED.TED, n.d.Web. Feb. 2016. <https:// www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice?language=en>.

8

9

Conover, Ted. Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. New York: Random House, 2000. Print.

“usdoj: fbci: Prisoners and Prisoner Re-Entry.” N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Jan. 2016. <http://www. justice.gov/archive/fbci/progmenu_reentry.html>.

10

327

E N D N OT ES A N D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Gelderloos, Peter, and Patrick Lincoln. “World Behind Bars: The Expansion of the American Prison Sell.” The Anarchist Library. Signalfire Press, 2005. Web. Winter 2016. <http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-and-patrick-lincoln-world-behind-bars-theexpansion-of-the-american-prison-sel#toc2>.

11

E N D N OT ES A N D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Diaz, Isabella, and James F.Tracy.“Number of US Prison Inmates Serving Life Sentences Hits New Record -Validated Independent News.” Project Censored. N.p., 13 Jan. 2014.Web. 4 Nov. 2015. <http:// www.projectcensored.org/number-us-prison-inmates-serving-life-sentences-hits-new-record/>.

17

Stevenson, Bryan. “Transcript of “We Need to Talk about an Injustice”” Bryan Stevenson: We Need to Talk about an Injustice. TED, Mar. 2012. Web. 05 Jan. 2016. <https://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice/ transcript?language=en>.

18

“Why Write a Prisoner.” WriteAPrisoner.com. N.p., n.d. Web. Fall 2015. <http://www. writeaprisoner.com/why-write-a-prisoner/default.aspx>.

12

Schwartzapfel, Beth. “Inside Stories.” Columbia Journalism Review, Mar.-Apr. 2013. Web. 5 Dec. 2015. <http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/inside_stories.php>.

13

Hovey, Kendra. “The One Perspective on Serial You Haven’t Heard: What Prisoners Think.”

Medium. N.p., 24 May 2015. Web. Jan. 2016. <https://medium.com/@KendraHovey/theone-perspective-on-serial-you-haven-t-heard-162138d10fce#.mz3zo0qcv>.

Rothenberg, David. Fortune in My Eyes: A Memoir of Broadway Glamour, Social Justice, and Political Passion. Milwaukee: Applause, 2012. Print.

19

14

Dimon, Laura. “19 Actual Statistics About America’s Prison System.”Policy.Mic. N.p., 03 Apr. 2014. Web. Oct. 2015. <http://mic.com/articles/86519/19-actual-statistics-about-america-s-prison-system#.LZ7mA2HZX>.

Chr istakis, Nicholas. “The Hidden Inf luence of Social Networks.” Nicholas Chr istakis:. ted, Feb. 2010. Web. 25 Oct. 2015. <https://w w w.ted.com/talks/ nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_influence_of_social_networks?language=en>.

20

15

“finding direction: Expanding Criminal Justice Options by Considering Policies of Other Nations.” (n.d.): n. pag. Justice Policy. Justice Policy Institute, Apr. 2011. Web. 13 Feb. 2016. <http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/sentencing.pdf>.

16

328

Todd, Charlie. “Improv Everywhere.” Improv Everywhere. N.p., n.d. Web. Sept. 2015. <http://improveverywhere.com/>.

21

22

Thurau, Lisa M. Strategies for Youth. N.p., 2012. Web. <http://strategiesforyouth.org/>.

Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage, 1983. Print.

23

329

E N D N OT ES A N D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

24

The Fortune Society. N.p., n.d. Web. Oct. 2015. <http://fortunesociety.org/>.

Chang, Candy. “Before I Die.” CandyChang.com. N.p., n.d. Web. Nov. 2015. <http:// candychang.com/work/before-i-die-in-nola/>.

25

E N D N OT ES A N D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Institutet, Karolinska. “Higher Suicide Risk after Served Prison Sentence.”ScienceDaily.

ScienceDaily, 28 Oct. 2014. Web. 23 Oct. 2015. <https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141028145548.htm>.

32

Smith, Emily Esfahani. “Social Connection Makes a Better Brain.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 29 Oct. 2013. Web. 11 Nov. 2015. <http://www.theatlantic.com/health/ archive/2013/10/social-connection-makes-a-better-brain/280934/>.

33

The Prison Arts Coalition. N.p., n.d. Web. Oct. 2015. <https://theprisonartscoalition. com/>.

26

“Welcome to Inside Out Project.” Inside Out Project. N.p., n.d. Web. Nov. 2015. <http:// www.insideoutproject.net/en>.

Panksepp, Jaak. “Feeling the Pain of Social Loss.” Feeling the Pain of Social Loss. Sciencemag. org, 10 Oct. 2003.Web. 5 Oct. 2015. <http://science.sciencemag.org/content/302/5643/237>.

Vigne, Nancy La, Elizabeth Davies, Tobi Palmer, and Robin Halberstadt. “Release Planning for Successful Reentry A Guide for Corrections, Service Providers, and Community Groups.”

PsycEXTRA Dataset (2008): n. pag. Www.urban.org. Urban Institute Justice Policy Center.

Web. <http://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publication-pdfs/411767-ReleasePlanning-for-Successful-Reentry.PDF>.

Panksepp, Jaak. “Neuroscience: Feeling the Pain of Social Loss.”ResearchGate.

S c i e n c e m a g . o r g , N o v. 2 0 0 3 . We b. < h t t p s : / / w w w. r e s e a r c h g a t e . n e t / publication/9056788_Neuroscience_Feeling_the_pain_of_social_loss>.

Flatow, Nicole. “The Prison Doors Open And You’re Released. You Have No Money Or Transportation. Now What?” ThinkProgress RSS. N.p., 21 June 2015. Web. 04 Feb. 2016. <http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/06/21/3667851/like-walk-jail-alone/>.

Colvin, Mark, Francis T. Cullen, and Thomas Vander Ven. “ncjrs Abstract.”. N.p., Feb. 2002. Web. 21 Jan. 2015. <https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract. aspx?ID=194567>.

United States of America. NYC Commission on Human Rights. - What the Law Covers.

N.p., n.d. Web. Feb. 2016. <http://www.nyc.gov/html/cchr/html/coverage/fair-chance. shtml>.

27

28

29

30

34

35 and 36

37

“usdoj: fbci: Prisoners and Prisoner Re-Entry.” N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Jan. 2016. <http://www. justice.gov/archive/f bci/progmenu_reentry.html>.

31

330

331

E N D N OT ES A N D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

E N D N OT ES A N D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Galloway, Katie, and Kelly Duane De La Vega. “A Ride Home From Prison.”The New York Times. The New York Times, 16 July 2015. Web. Jan. 2016. <http://www.nytimes.com/ video/opinion/100000003802724/a-ride-home-from-prison.html?src=vidm>.

38

Vigne, Nancy La, Elizabeth Davies, Tobi Palmer, and Robin Halberstadt. “Release Planning for Successful Reentry A Guide for Corrections, Service Providers, and Community Groups.”

PsycEXTRA Dataset (2008): n. pag. Www.urban.org. Urban Institute Justice Policy Center.

Web. <http://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publication-pdfs/411767-ReleasePlanning-for-Successful-Reentry.PDF>.

39

”Home - HomeWAV Web Access Visitation for Correctional Facilities.” HomeWAV Web Access Visitation for Correctional Facilities. N.p., n.d.Web. Feb. 2016. <http://www.homewav.com/>.

40

Morales,Yolanda.“i-can Works to Reduce Recidivism.”The Fortune Society. N.p., 22 Jan. 2015.

Web. Jan. 2015. <http://fortunesociety.org/2015/01/22/i-can-works-to-reduce-recidivism/>.

41

Lieberman, Matthew D. Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. New York: Penguin Random House, 2013. Print.

42

Benns, Whitney. “American Slavery, Reinvented.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 21 Sept. 2015. Web. 4 Feb. 2016. <http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/ prison-labor-in-america/406177/>.

43

44 https://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100228072200AAS6TYv (Couldn’t find a more substantial source.)

332

333

E N D N OT ES A N D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

B O O KS

Conover, Ted. Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. New York: Random House, 2000. Print.

Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam, 1995. Print.

Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage, 1983. Print.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. N.p.: Macmillan, n.d. Print.

Lieberman, Matthew D. Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Patokos, Tassos. Internal Game Theory. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Roberts, Gregory David. Shantaram: A Novel. New York: St. Martinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, 2004. Print.

Rothenberg, David. Fortune in My Eyes: A Memoir of Broadway Glamour, Social Justice, and Political Passion. Milwaukee: Applause, 2012. Print.

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. New York: Penguin Random House, NY. Print.

335

E N D N OT ES A N D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

E N D N OT ES A N D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

A R T I C LE S

Colvin, Mark, Francis T. Cullen, and Thomas Vander Ven. “NCJRS Abstract.”NCJRS Abstract. N.p., Feb. 2002. Web. 21 Jan. 2015. <https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/ abstract.aspx?ID=194567>.

Diaz, Isabella, and James F.Tracy. “Number of US Prison Inmates Serving Life Sentences Hits New Record -Validated Independent News.” Project Censored. N.p., 13 Jan. 2014.Web. 4 Nov. 2015. <http:// www.projectcensored.org/number-us-prison-inmates-serving-life-sentences-hits-new-record/>.

Dimon, Laura. “19 Actual Statistics About America’s Prison System.”Policy.Mic. N.p., 03 Apr. 2014. Web. Oct. 2015. <http://mic.com/articles/86519/19-actual-statistics-about-americas-prison-system#.LZ7mA2HZX>.

Flatow, Nicole. “The Prison Doors Open And You’re Released. You Have No Money Or Transportation. Now What?” ThinkProgress RSS. N.p., 21 June 2015. Web. 04 Feb. 2016. <http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/06/21/3667851/like-walk-jail-alone/>.

Galloway, Katie, and Kelly Duane De La Vega. “A Ride Home From Prison.”The New York Times. The New York Times, 16 July 2015. Web. Jan. 2016. <http://www.nytimes.com/ video/opinion/100000003802724/a-ride-home-from-prison.html?src=vidm>.

Gelderloos, Peter, and Patrick Lincoln. “World Behind Bars: The Expansion of the American Prison Sell.” The Anarchist Library. Signalfire Press, 2005. Web. Winter 2016. <http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-and-patrick-lincoln-world-behind-bars-theexpansion-of-the-american-prison-sel#toc2>.

Hovey, Kendra. “The One Perspective on Serial You Haven’t Heard: What Prisoners Think.”

336

Medium. N.p., 24 May 2015. Web. Jan. 2016. <https://medium.com/@KendraHovey/theone-perspective-on-serial-you-haven-t-heard-162138d10fce#.mz3zo0qcv>.

Institutet, Karolinska. “Higher Suicide Risk after Served Prison Sentence.”ScienceDaily.

ScienceDaily, 28 Oct. 2014. Web. 23 Oct. 2015. <https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141028145548.htm>.

Panksepp, Jaak. “Feeling the Pain of Social Loss.” Feeling the Pain of Social Loss.

Sciencemag.org, 10 Oct. 2003. Web. 5 Oct. 2015. <http://science.sciencemag.org/ content/302/5643/237>.

Panksepp, Jaak. “Neuroscience: Feeling the Pain of Social Loss.”ResearchGate.

S c i e n c e m a g . o r g , N o v. 2 0 0 3 . We b . < h t t p s : // w w w. r e s e a r c h g a t e . n e t / publication/9056788_Neuroscience_Feeling_the_pain_of_social_loss>.

Schwartzapfel, Beth. “Inside Stories.” Columbia Journalism Review. Columbia Journalism Review, Mar.-Apr. 2013. Web. 5 Dec. 2015. <http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/inside_stories. php>.

Smith, Emily Esfahani. “Social Connection Makes a Better Brain.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 29 Oct. 2013. Web. 11 Nov. 2015. <http://www.theatlantic.com/health/ archive/2013/10/social-connection-makes-a-better-brain/280934/>.

337

E N D N OT ES A N D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

E N D N OT ES A N D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

A R T I C LE S

O R GA N I Z AT I O N S/ W E B S IT E S

Vigne, Nancy La, Elizabeth Davies, Tobi Palmer, and Robin Halberstadt. “Release Planning for Successful Reentry A Guide for Corrections, Service Providers, and Community Groups.”

PsycEXTRA Dataset (2008): n. pag. Www.urban.org. Urban Institute Justice Policy Center.

Web. <http://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publication-pdfs/411767-ReleasePlanning-for-Successful-Reentry.PDF>.

drive change. N.p., n.d. Web. Nov. 2015. <http://drivechangenyc.org/>.

“Improv Everywhere.” Improv Everywhere. N.p., n.d. Web. Sept. 2015. <http://improveverywhere.com/>.

Inside Out Project. N.p., n.d. Web. Nov. 2015. <http://www.insideoutproject.net/en>.

VIDEOS

United States of America. NYC Commission on Human Rights. - What the Law Covers.

N.p., n.d. Web. Feb. 2016. <http://www.nyc.gov/html/cchr/html/coverage/fair-chance. shtml>.

Refoundry. N.p., 2015. Web. Oct. 2015. <http://www.refoundry.org/>.

Chr istak is, Nicholas. “The Hidden In f luence of Socia l Net works.” Nicholas Christakis:. ted, Feb. 2010. Web. 25 Oct. 2015. <https://w w w.ted.com/talks/ nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_influence_of_social_networks?language=en>.

Lieberman, Matthew. “The Social Brain and Its Superpowers”Tedxtalks.ted.com. ted, 9 Oct. 2013. Web. <http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-Social-Brain-And-Its-Superp>.

Stevenson, Bryan. “We Need to Talk about an Injustice.” TED. TED, n.d. Web. Feb. 2016. <https://www.ted.com/talks/br yan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_ injustice?language=en>.

Strategies for Youth. N.p., 2012. Web. <http://strategiesforyouth.org/>.

The Fortune Society. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Oct. 2015. <http://fortunesociety.org/>.

The Prison Arts Coalition. N.p., n.d. Web. Oct. 2015. <https://theprisonartscoalition.com/>.

“USDOJ: FBCI: Prisoners and Prisoner Re-Entry.” USDOJ: FBCI: Prisoners and Prisoner Re-Entry. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Jan. 2016. <http://www.justice.gov/archive/f bci/progmenu_ reentry.html>.

“Why Write a Prisoner.” WriteAPrisoner.com. N.p., n.d. Web. Fall 2015. <http://www.writeaprisoner.com/why-write-a-prisoner/default.aspx>.

338

339