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Travelling Exhibit |
Ron Levine and Michael Wou: Prisoners of Age White-haired Walker Smith could be your grandfather. At 76, he is in the third decade of a life sentence for murder. Incarcerated at the Hamilton Correctional Institute for the Aged and Infirm in Alabama, he is one of a growing number of inmates in penitentiaries devoted to geriatric care. Photographer Ron Levine and Michael Wou have spent four years documenting this unique population. Accompanied by written excerpts of conversations with guards and inmates, Levine’s work depicts the striking images and stories of elderly men behind bars rather than in retirement homes. While visiting six North American Correctional facilities from 1996 to 2000, he captured the complexity of a subject we tend to take for granted. Many of these men have done terrible things. Society locks them up and turns away, but this exhibit encourages visitors to consider the human dimension of doing time and growing old in the process. They are often in wheelchairs and on crutches, or tied to IV drips. "My prison is becoming an old folks home," observed Warden Cain at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana. The unique vision in Prisoners of Age, illuminates that reality. When it comes to Walker Smith, the reality is grim. "Most of what he possesses he wears around his neck," said a Hamilton corrections officer, referring to a simple military dog-tag chain that Smith treasures. "Everything else belongs to the State of Alabama." Not all of Levine’s subjects command such sympathy; some have committed indisputably horrible acts. However, they are growing old at a handful of North American penitentiaries that house geriatric inmates. Places like this have sprung up to cope with the graying of America’s prison population. This wave of older prisoners has begun to overwhelm more traditional facilities, like Angola State maximum security penitentiary in Louisiana. In 1995, for the first time, more inmates there died than were paroled. Tough-minded legislation and mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes may not do much to deter robbery, rape, murder and mayhem on the streets, but certainly accounts for a steadily increasing number of inmates. More than two million American are currently behind bars. Approximately 35 percent of them are edging far past middle age toward what would be considered retirement years among the general public. Once behind bars, these men no longer seem to be our concern, yet their destinies are inextricably entangled wit our own. For one thing, the annual cost of incarceration at Alabama’s Hamilton Correctional Institution for the Aged and Infirm is as much as $60,000 of taxpayer money compared with about $12,000 per prisoner at facilities without special accommodations. Astonished by such statistics, Levine continued working on his project at these institutions, sensing that the immensity of the problem could be best-expressed through larger than life portraits. "Since I started taking these photographs in 1996, more than 50 of the prisoners I met have died in prison," Levine says. I keep asking myself, does this make sense?" The exhibition of photographs features 25 haunting portraits produced as four-by-eight foot prints, as well as 40 framed 20x20" prints. Prisoners of Age is dramatically displayed in Cellblock Two, once home to Eastern State’s own "Old Timers." In conjunction, Levine and Wou have published a 208 page hard-cover companion book. This critically acclaimed exhibit was on display at Alcatraz Penitentiary from September 27, 2000 until March 4, 2001. Ron Levine is a distinguished professional photographer based in New York, NY. Mr. Levine’s photography has been exhibited through the world including venues in Canada, Mexico, Columbia, Poland, Germany and the United States. His clients include Verizon, AT&T, Royal Bank, ESPN, IBM, Pfizer and American Express. Learn more at the Prisoners of Age Web Site
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