How many for-profit prisons are operating in the United States? Where are previously incarcerated people finding opportunities to rebuild their lives after getting free? Are they getting free at all? The answers to these questions are potentially bleaker than most would assume, but many people are working hard to change that.
People like the creators of The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration, formerly incarcerated researcher-activist James Kilgore and illustrator-designer Vic Liu, who have combined their talents and experience to create an accessible examination of the hyper-proliferation of prisons in the United States. Through essays, testimony, graphs, portraits, and visual flourishes, The Warehouse especially foregrounds the human cost of said hyper-criminalization by first providing an overview of the problem, its scale, and history, then describing the material experience of being incarcerated, and finally listing the different approaches to liberation.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Iván Perez
How did this collaboration come about? Was all this truly the result of a cold call email from an artist to a writer, like the “Acknowledgments” page suggests?
Vic Liu
It was truly the result of a cold email! I had just finished putting out my first book, a super-inclusive, fully illustrated sex-ed book on masturbation. When I read James’s book Understanding Mass Incarceration, I immediately knew I wanted to make a visual book with him. I thought there was huge potential and need for illustration and information design to make such important and difficult material more accessible.
It’s a testament to James’s incredible willingness to take a shot on someone he knew very little about. It’s been such a delightful surprise to see how well we get along. We both are motivated by a deep sense of justice. I don’t think either of us like cognitive dissonance very well.
James Kilgore
Vic summed it up pretty well. Her ideas connected with my own vision in a way. During my time in prison, I kept getting books and articles about prison, but I had very few people to share them with. Before I got locked up, I wrote popular educational materials for workers in South Africa in English, which was a third or fourth language for most of them. So, I was used to making the language accessible, but combining that language with the graphic/information elements took me into another universe. It was a great adventure with Vic leading the way.
Iván Perez
During those early conversations, did you two set broad or overall goals for The Warehouse? If so, which priorities did you discuss?
Vic Liu
First and foremost, we wanted to make the book accessible–emotionally, intuitively, and across reading levels. We wanted not only the visuals but also the design of each page to give the reader multiple access points and avoid relying solely on the audience’s comfort at reading text. James’s Understanding Mass Incarceration was inspired by his desire to make information about the US carceral system accessible to people in prison, and this book was no different. It was very important to both James and me that we approached accessibility from every angle, whether by making the language as clear as possible, designing multiple visual entry points, or ensuring that each visual could still be intelligible when photocopied in black and white.
We wanted to create a book that spoke to the shared humanity of the reader and the people incarcerated. We wanted to ensure that the book uplifted the dignity and humanity of those impacted by the system. We also wanted to make the book as easy to read as possible because of the heaviness of the subject matter itself.
James Kilgore
I was attracted by the idea of combining the skills and insights of a graphic artist with the knowledge that comes from the lived experience of incarceration. In recent years, the expertise of formerly incarcerated people has often been pushed to the sidelines. Mass incarceration became a fashionable topic, and people keep cranking out academic treatises on themes related to prisons. Some are useful, but most are written for promotion in the academy or to land seats on panels at prestigious academic conferences held in exotic venues. The lived experience of people who have been incarcerated should not be commodified like that. So, I wanted this book to speak with the voice and through the experience of people impacted by incarceration, including immigration prisons. I wanted to be sure you wouldn’t need a degree to read our book. But then, you also don’t need a degree to figure out that mass incarceration is a torturous tragedy, a vast waste of money, and a great reinforcer of white supremacy, so why should the information about mass incarceration be packaged in a way that presents an obstacle to people wanting a deeper understanding of mass incarceration. If we are going to transform the criminal legal system and move down the road to abolition, those impacted by incarceration will have must play a leadership role.
Iván Perez
Throughout this primer, there is a concerted effort to correct the record or dispel common misconceptions about what happens to people when they serve prison sentences in the US. As someone who has read about prison abolition before, I still learned a lot. What are the main takeaways for readers who might come in with less prior knowledge about mass incarceration?
Vic Liu
It is vital for me that people walk away with a deeper understanding of the humanity, resilience, and innovation of incarcerated individuals. One of the most defining characteristics of the prison system is how much it is designed to dehumanize people. But the people incarcerated are not mere victims; they have so much power and strength, and they fight every minute of every day to retain their humanity and identity.
James Kilgore
Yes, prison is oppressive, authoritarian, racist, degrading. But we fight back. We liberate food from the kitchen and cook our own versions of burritos, cheesecakes, and marinara sauce. We enjoy ourselves by organizing card games and chess tournaments, by making prison wine called pruno, and by getting the guards to smuggle drugs in so we can self-medicate. We sew, we draw, and we make beautiful handbags from empty potato chip wrappers. I wrote the drafts of eight novels during my time locked up. Most of them I wrote by hand. We find our ways in prison. So, we wanted this book with the fantastic drawings by Vic and incarcerated artists to show the beauty and creativity that is also a part of prison life and the consciousness of so many people forced to live in cages. Most books about prison omit that part.
Iván Perez
Some of the most evocative elements included are the illustrations of formerly incarcerated people who have become advocates for prison reform. These are all drawn by currently imprisoned people. What was the thinking behind these? Was compiling them complicated? I ask because I’ve heard from people teaching in prisons how hard it can be to bring things in or out of classrooms on the inside.
Vic Liu
These portraits bring so much life and heart to the book. I wanted to find an opportunity for people who are currently incarcerated to contribute to the book, and this idea hit me when we were exploring how to include and depict the stories of these incredible activists. We worked directly with the Justice Arts Coalition, a group that amplifies and connects incarcerated artists around the country, to reach out to the artists and commission these portraits. The artists include Brian Hindson, Sean J. White, Robert A. Odom, Sean Fox, Kenneth Reams, and William Livingston III. We received the art both physically and digitally, depending on the rules of each prison.
Iván Perez
On a related note, it is hard to ignore how little reliable and consistent quantitative data is available when writing a book like this. Could you say more on the subject?
Vic Liu
There is a massive lack of information flow in and particularly out of prison. I can’t help but visualize it in my brain, like a huge opaque wall between the outside and the inside. Rarely are writers, photographers, or data scientists allowed fully inside the worlds of prisons, and the few photographs or data that are collected rarely speak to the range of siloed experiences across different prisons. The illustrations, therefore, served an essential purpose in chipping away at this information barrier. Even so, your point about the consistency of the data is very important. And for much of this data, because of the intense power dynamics present in how this data is collected, you have to read between the lines to understand what is truly happening. For example, most sexual abuse in prisons goes unreported because of fear of retaliation or retribution.
James Kilgore
I have been digging through that data since I came home from prison in 2009. So, while prisons hold a lot of data secrets, we have been able to extract a lot as well. Organizations like The Prison Policy Initiative and The Sentencing Project are constantly cranking out data on prisons. When I worked at MediaJustice on the Challenging E-Carceration project, we extracted data on electronic monitoring and other forms of surveillance. It is also crucial to recognize that peoples’ lived experiences are data and just as crucial to sharp analysis as statistics.
Our work owes a debt of gratitude to activists and directly impacted people who have used their lenses and lived experience to help us get a much broader understanding of how prisons function, how they oppress, and how we resist. I am thinking of disability justice activists like Talila Lewis and Liat Ben Moshe, who have highlighted how prisons excessively target people with disabilities. Organizations like Black and Pink have taken up special struggles faced by LGBTQIA+ folks. Survived & Punished has brought the situation of people sent to prison for fighting back against gender-based violent attacks into the public eye. And perhaps most importantly, the organizations of formerly incarcerated people, such as the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, All of Us or None, and the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Family Movement, just to name a few, have been essential in providing us with access to the connections and the information we needed to try to tell this story.
Iván Perez
Finally, what’s next for both of you?
Vic Liu
My dirty secret, which I’ve only begun telling people recently, is that I am working on a novel! I deeply believe in the importance of fiction (especially sci-fi and fantasy) as a space for creating and dreaming alternate worlds.
James Kilgore
I have three major projects on the go. The first is to continue to build FirstFollowers, the reentry organization in Champaign, Illinois, where I live. I want to advance the political activism component of FirstFollowers so that it is not merely a service provider but also a dynamic force for social and racial justice in our community. Second, I have a fellowship with the Community Justice Exchange to explore the issue of international solidarity. I spent eighteen years living in southern Africa, doing educational work for trade unions and communities. When I got extradited back to the US and landed in prison for six and a half years, my connection to African liberation receded. But the Zionist genocide against the Palestinians has rekindled my internationalist orientation. We can’t transform the world if we can’t make connections across illegitimate borders and the boundaries of our imaginations. So, with Community Justice Exchange and Vic, I will produce a series of zines on the theme of international solidarity. Lastly, my three granddaughters, our son, and his partner are moving from Boston to Champaign-Urbana, so my future also includes a lot of child care and diaper changes.
NONFICTION
The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration
By James Kilgore and Vic Liu
PM Press
Published June 4, 2024
