CHICAGO — Two men crouch on a lawn, hard at work gardening. Another man skillfully wields clippers against the head of a smocked client in a barber chair. Two others sit above stacks of white garments they’re cutting, the fabric a striking contrast to their glistening dark skin.
These are among Chicago photographer Lloyd DeGrane’s photographs of men at work, displayed at the Gage Gallery in Chicago through February 4. But there is a big difference between these men and others working as gardeners, barbers and tailors around the country. These men earn only cents per hour, and at the end of their shift they never go home. Rather they go back to cells at Stateville or Joliet prisons or the Cook County jail in Illinois, some of the most famous penal institutions in the Midwest.
Prison labor is among the facets of life behind bars that DeGrane captured in the early 1990s. Other images include the state’s decrepit electric chairs, stored in a basement; one of the last Panopticon-style prisons (Stateville) with a guard tower in the center of tiers of cells; men sticking heads and legs surreally out of the small door slots of otherwise windowless solitary isolation chambers.
Much has been reported about the ethics of prison labor, wherein private companies and state agencies frequently profit from work by prisoners paid less than even child workers in Chinese sweatshops.
DeGrane didn’t focus on such commercial industries at the Illinois lockups he visited; but the prison work he observed melded into a larger picture of daily life in detention that he said defied stereotypes and affected how he did his own work.
While the prisoners were earning a pittance, DeGrane thought the people he met were overall glad to be working. It helped them cope with one of the worst aspects of prison life – the crushing monotony and boredom. While violence, paranoia and fear may be ever-present parts of prison life – and the parts most sensationalized in media – perhaps the hardest thing to deal with for many is the idea that, as DeGrane put it, “you’re trying to sleep your life away…it’s the same thing day after day after day.”
And of course people have little choice in the kind of work they’re doing, and little or no chance for training, gaining new skills or improving their lot. With prisoners fulfilling the jobs needed to keep a population the size of a medium town running, the tableau of prison jobs and services take on an almost communistic feel…or more darkly, the feel of a concentration camp. DeGrane told me:
It’s not like you get training – if you can cut hair, you’re a barber…And it’s different than out here – you can’t go to one barber and then decide that you’re going to go to another barber shop, because there’s only one.
Guards also play a prominent role in DeGrane’s photos, and the looks on their faces expose something of what it’s like to be a prison guard. They all look stolid, tense, focused, defensive and aggressive at the same time…not a relaxed smile or twinkle in the eye among them.
Photos of the plethora of home-made weapons found in the prisons – long sharp carved shanks, gloves with gleaming metal claws in the fingers, cylinders filled with shotgun shells – show how guards do indeed face danger and violence on a constant basis. One stirring photo shows a black-haired female guard examining a long wooden shank, her face a hardened emotionless mask below an equally hardened mullet hairdo.
Journalist Ted Conover’s book “Guarding Sing Sing,” where he goes undercover as a guard in New York’s notorious prison, shows the disturbing emotional transformation caused by the job, where someone going in as a dispassionate observer becomes perversely caught up in the primal us-versus-them atmosphere.
Like Conover and guards from New York to Illinois and beyond, DeGrane said he learned how to go about his own work with a sharpened sense of distrust and wariness while roaming the prisons, avoiding dark hallways and cognizant that if a guard decided to shoot his shotgun at unruly prisoners, “the pellets would probably hit me too.”
DeGrane noted that even in maximum security units prisoners would move freely through common areas for much of the day, and while he came to consider some of them friends and saw first-hand the overall corruption, racism and classism of the system, he also realized clearly that some prisoners were truly violent, dangerous men who “should” be there.
“There is evil lurking within that (place), people who you do want to be there,” he told me, pointing to his photo of serial killer Richard Speck, taken while Speck was working as a painter in the prison. Speck, who raped and killed eight student nurses in Chicago in 1966, picked up DeGrane’s dropped lens cap and licked it – DeGrane made sure Speck saw him throw it away afterwards. Speck used his painting job to make moonshine in paint cans, DeGrane said, and he was too drunk to be photographed the first two times they met.
In many prisons of course the clearly violent and psychopathic inmates are outnumbered by those who could be considered there for socio-economic reasons, including the lack of decent job opportunities or education in their communities; communities where drug-dealing or other illegal activities are the most lucrative options. The Cook County jail population, about 80 percent African American at the time DeGrane was there, included many who had not yet gone to trial but could not afford bail.
The exhibit includes multiple letters from Sam Gutierrez, a former inmate with whom DeGrane became friendly. Gutierrez was incarcerated for bank robbery, and seems proud of what he sees as his line of work, relating in one note that he can hardly go anywhere without “casing the joint.” Gutierrez has now finished his sentence and is struggling to earn a living without returning to what he considered his career. Though he saw his “job” as stealing money, once in prison Gutierrez could never manage to do what he bitterly described as “buying justice.”
SPECIAL DEAL: Subscribe to our award-winning print magazine, a publication Bernie Sanders calls "unapologetically on the side of social and economic justice," for just $1 an issue! That means you'll get 10 issues a year for $9.95.
Kari Lydersen is a Chicago-based journalist, author and assistant professor at Northwestern University, where she leads the investigative specialization at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Her books include Mayor 1%: Rahm Emanuel and the Rise of Chicago’s 99%.
