Inmate paints with M&Ms and brush made from his own hair

A Pelican Bay inmate serving life in solitary confinement for second-degree murder creates amazing images with paint brewed from M&Ms. Snip from NYT article by Adam Liptak:

[Donny Johnson] orders his supplies from the prison commissary once a month. The M&M’s are 60 cents a pack, and he gets 10 packs at a time. He puts from one to five of the candies in each of the jelly containers, drizzles a little water in and later fishes out the chocolate cores, leaving liquid of various colors, which get stronger if they sit for a couple of days.

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

it's no secret i have a little thing for a man who's been incarcerated for the last 3 and some odd years. no, he's not just a penpal, we've been friends for the past ten years. but whatever. he's my dude and i love him and i will support him through anything.

last year he (mike) disappeared for about 6 months. no letters, no calls, no word from him whatsoever. iit was excrutiating. the only thing that kept me from thinking he was dead, was the database of inmates. had he been dead, it would have said "deceased" instead of "incarcerated".

anyway, after 6 months, i got a letter from him finally and he told me he'd been in the hole, or solitary. he had no access to paper or envelopes, and just recently he told me that you can have paper and envelopes in the hole, but only if you bring it with you when you go. and it is under very few circumstances that an inmate is given any fair warning he's going to the hole.

in some cases, like the painting man in solitary above, or in mike's case, the man being subjected to solitary confinement is intelligent enough to make something out of nothing, to find some productive and healthy way to spend their time so that they a) don't lose their minds and b) feel they have nothing left to lose and commit even worse than they had already. but in most cases, men in solitary confinement lose it. they have nothing but cement walls to stare at, day in and day out, this is all they have. from the original NYT article:

They reflect the sensory deprivation and diminished depth perception of someone held in a windowless cell for almost two decades.

He has not touched another person in 17 years.

Behind Bars, He Turns M&M’s Into an Art Form - New York Times

what good do we honestly believe this kind of sensory deprivation is doing? aside from any form of vengeance, what good is this doing? not allowing an artist to have artists' tools? not allowing a man to touch base with a friend whom he loves more than anything in the world? what does this do?

it causes anger, which in turn causes violence and in men who have already committed violent acts, making them more violent is not a smart thing to do. the biggest reason for incarceration, or at least, the reason most of the western world's ignorant population likes to believe, is to keep these violent men off the streets so they cannot harm another person. but there are people in prison, too. kids in prison, teenagers who were caught with a gram of marijuana, kids who had a heroin problem and made one mistake, and in mike's case, a fucking mind-blowing genius who got a little fucked up for a while. these people are in prison and they live amongst each other and to make them more violent, to keep these tiny simple things from them that keep them sane, is absolutely cruel and unusual. because it leads to anger and more violence and deaths, sometimes other prisoners, sometimes guards.

there is no intelligence behind deprivation. deprivation is solely an act of vengeance and any progressive society would toss vengeance aside in the name of true rehabilitation and societal safety.

technorati tags:prison, art, incarceration, jail