The CORRECTIONS project is an ongoing, multi-tiered process questioning overcriminalization and mass imprisonment in the United States. Either through the recent pamphlets or in objects, books, and public art I have made an effort to reach an audience with the complexity of this crisis.

 

Today there are nearly 7,000,000 individuals under some form of judicial supervision: 2,300,000 are imprisoned in either federal and state prisons or in county jails. The remainder of those supervised, either on probation or parole.

 

This social crisis is a moral crisis as well. If we do not examine—in detail—how every community is impacted by these staggering numbers, then we will also overlook the conditions that have encouraged this outcome. Change occurs only when a cause is understood as well as the effect.

 

The scale of this data escapes the comprehension of most people. Expanding upon this deficiency is that a majority of white people do not have any relationship to an incarcerated individual. “Black people in this country are imprisoned at more than five times the rate of whites; one in 10 black children has a parent behind bars, compared with about one in 60 white kids”. (Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality) Even with an increase in published scholarship and news accounting these details, too many whites remain uninvolved with over-criminalization or reducing mass imprisonment and the social conditions that create and are impacted by this crisis.

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