Around 2010, Sara Bennett, a former public defender, began taking portraits of women who had been incarcerated with Judith Clark. Clark, convicted for her role in a deadly and well-known Weather Underground armored truck heist, was seeking clemency from the state of New York after serving 28 years in prison. Bennett had taken up her case pro bono at the urging of some of the women she knew who had been inside with Clark.
As part of her strategy to help Clark win her bid, Bennett employed different creative methods to build sympathy and public attention for her case. For instance, she recorded notable actors reading letters of support for Clark in an effort to engage New York’s governor at the time, David Paterson, who was blind.
And she started taking photos of Clark’s peers.
“I thought I could humanize Judy by taking portraits of women who had been incarcerated with her and have them write about her influence on their lives,” Bennett writes in the afterword of her new book, “Looking Inside: Women with Life Sentences.”
In “Spirit on the Inside: Reflections on Doing Time with Judith Clark,” the advocacy booklet Bennett put together to help Clark, women who served decades in prison sit on stoops and pose in playgrounds with their children.
“I was drawn to her because she was so unselfish,” one woman wrote.
“Judy tells you the truths about yourself that you don’t want to know or see,” wrote another. “At first she pissed me off for doing that. But I am forever grateful to Judy for being one of the catalysts who allowed me to work on ‘me’ and who instigated my changing into the person I am today,”
In 2016, Clark’s sentence was commuted and she became eligible for parole. She was not released until 2019.
But Bennett’s project didn’t stop. For 13 years, Bennett continued taking portraits of women, specifically those who had been convicted of violent crimes — and this time, from the inside as well as outside. “I wanted to show something that I took for granted,” she writes, “that people with life sentences are ‘ordinary’ human beings, in the best sense of the word, who should be treated with compassion and respect.”
Her remarkable portraits subvert the viewer’s expectation of what prison and the women who have been detained there might look like. There are colorful backdrops and massive grins in the photos taken during visits. In the nursery at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a sparsely decorated Christmas tree sits in a corner. There are stacks of books and a fireplace made of construction paper affixed to the wall in one of the recreation rooms.
You can tell these women took care with their appearances; the makeup and hairstyles are meticulous. But there are some details that can’t be made beautiful. The bars on the windows and signs that read “authorized personnel only” are reminders of where we are. One photo is of a young woman named Jennifer, standing in the infant center at Bedford Hills. The toys around her remind you that about 60% of women in prison are mothers (the prison nursery program at Bedford Hills is the oldest in the country). They also remind you that others, like Jennifer, who became incarcerated at 17, were kids themselves when they went to prison.
The photos taken in prison are interspersed with portraits of women — sometimes the same women, years later — sitting on their beds after getting free, surrounded by items that may well be considered contraband in an institutional setting: stuffed animals, laundry detergent, an ornate lamp. A woman named Deborah is pictured sitting in an office chair inside a “grievance room” at Taconic Correctional Facility. Later, in another portrait, she smiles wide, reclining in her own bedroom four weeks after her release.
The images are complemented by each woman’s handwritten answer to the question: “When you see this photo I took of you, what does it make you think?”
“Every evening, when I come home from work and enter my studio apartment, I am overjoyed,” wrote Judith Clark, five months after her release.
Each photo is poignant and powerful. Some women appear relaxed, unburdened, in their own spaces. But their writing evokes the difficulties of reentry, how little their family understands and how they still long for true freedom, away from the surveillance of a parole officer. Each is a reminder that getting out of prison is never the end of the journey.
Bennett’s collection is an important contribution to the limited visual history of women in prison. With her permission, Prison Journalism Project is sharing a selection of her portraits alongside the subjects’ handwritten captions.
— Carla Canning, associate editor
