Wow is all I can say

On Wednesday, 2008 around 9:45 p.m., my name was called to pack it up. I knew where I was about to head still I asked the officer on duty and he confirmed Jackson State Prison. I wasn't sad, mad, happy, or anything. I had no emotions since my sentencing.  I've been numb and ready for this nightmare at the end. Before I left the dorm I said my goodbyes and I love you’s.

I gave all my leftover commissary to a guy named William who's been a dear friend to me while I was there. Mr. Davis gave me one of the most genuine hugs ever and told me he was going to be praying for me. Jay Butler, Haitian T.I., Pinky, and Mark farewell in my Rihanna voice.

I called my mom who almost brought me to tears as she was crying cuz she didn't raise me to be going through this. Her first child, pride and joy, on his way to prison. I'm sorry Mama for all of the pain that I put you through. As we walked to booking to go wait in a holding cell I seen other guys crying cuz they didn't want to go but a lot of other guys seemed to be joyful about it. I was only sentenced  to 1 year but some had 20, 40, 10, and life. Wow was all I can say.

Artwork by Glynn B. Cartledge

He exists in a bubble of incertitude yet pro per, the court said.

The trial court told Mr. Ofeldt that he could represent himself even though the court was aware of the extensive record of his mental illness. I represented him on his appeal.

Prisons provide a conveyor belt to loop you back in

Men designed the United States criminal justice system for reincarceration of chattel. Consider: the conveyor belt.

A conveyor belt is an essential tool in the material handling business -- continuous moving strips used for carrying materials from one place to another in an endless loop. Mostly belts convey large numbers of materials quickly, heightening efficiency in the transporting of ubiquitous goods.

People incarcerated once are prepared for reincarceration by the very system that is titled “justice.” The United States recidivism rate is 70% within five years. The formerly incarcerated travel to prison to home and back. I have known them. This enormous percentage of recidivists is due to conditions inside and outside of prison. Because of what prisons have stood for, reentry requires too much of those coming out of prisons and they are ill equipped to deal with the stressors they meet upon leaving. 

They must re-establish family relationships, reenter a truncated job market, and relearn how to be a community member. Many ex-prisoners develop serious health issues and often chronic conditions like diabetes, Hepatitis C, asthma, as well as mental issues. They face fines and fees that often they cannot afford.  

See:  https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html for a further discussion.

Artwork by Glynn B. Cartledge

My God will supply

You have tried evermore to quell me with your oppression given to you by your self-appointed Supremacy, which gave you title to me as your private property. You try forevermore to erase my essence. Even today with your concrete walls and metal bars. I don’t worship you or your god. I am mine own self with wings and dreams of Heaven. You keep on yelling.

Artwork by Glynn B. Cartledge

P2P, a visit with my neighbors

The P2P portrait series examines formerly incarcerated people’s lives. I am so thankful for these former inmates/collaborators without whom this series would not exist.

Photograph courtesy of Jennifer Garza-Cuen

Model: Johnny Bailey

Jail Cell Collaging

Nothing is more discomfiting than sitting in a jail cell having broken a socially imposed code of conduct. Yet each person awaiting in the 6’ x 8’ concrete jail cell deserves not humiliation but dignity.

For me, creating a collage of a jail cell is an expression of humanity in situ, a meditative process of cutting, pasting, and assembling disparate materials to form an intention. It is also a codified language that allows me to pull from a variety of sources and condense them into a single image. A cathartic violence to the process eschews calmness that allows the broken-up pieces to be restructured while remaining fractured. My hope is that elements of poetic abstraction mixed with critically charged content allows the jail cell collages to live as hybrid portraits of otherness, isolation, diversity, and systematic injustice.

Art by Glynn B. Cartledge

Untitled Jail Cell Collage No. 39

My Work is Deeply Personal

My work comes from a deeply personal place I occupied for many years. I tell stories of the formerly incarcerated. The stories are not a new or unique but they come from a privileged standpoint of real-time experience. I speak about the old time, long time universality of criminal injustice, which targets the least privileged among us. America set up social rules and norms for us to follow. It then delves out punishment for what it sees as violations of those norms. Those of us comporting with those norms are offended by those who do not agree with our personal sensibilities.   

As a criminal defense attorney I am acutely aware of the pervasive chokehold that the criminal system imposes on millions of people and identifiable communities. The system applies unfairly to those who are not in our own sphere of community. “The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once observed that, ‘for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village.’ ”  Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe pp. 333.

At the very root of this problem is a madness of capitalism and fear. We feed the prison industrial system with its needed inmates in order to make it work. I was a part of that system as a defense attorney. I benefitted. As did the prosecutors, the police, the judges, the court staff, the parole and probation staff, the jails, the prisons, and all of us in society. Incarceration is a cycle that we must examine and break with equity,  solutions that address the real problems, and justice.

Work in progress in my studio

Jail Visits

As a criminal attorney, whenever I represented someone who was held in custody – whether it was a federal crime or a state crime -- they were housed at the county detention center in the county where the trial was to be conducted, aka the jail.  We were allowed contact visits with our clients. I went to the jails often, having a policy of visiting my clients once a week.

Attorneys could visit their clients at the jail via a phone with a glass partition lined up beside many others, in small private rooms – the way you have probably seen on tv or movies — or in the housing unit where they lived. I always requested to meet in the housing unit because talking to a stressed client behind a sheet of glass with a telephone or in a small bare room was not only less private and awkward but it felt disrespectful.

The beginning of the journey at the jail was to go down steps to the basement and then walk unescorted through multiple concrete hallways mostly below ground to get to the units. If I happened upon inmates walking in these hallways – which happened all the time -- they had to stop walking and face the wall. After travelling in the hallways and going through various locked metal doors, where I had to push a buzzer to get through and show my badge, I would arrive at the unit.

An officer would press a buzzer opening the large, metal door and escort me into a room set aside from the open portion of the housing unit. I could talk face to face with the client in that room without disturbance sometimes for hours. The conference room had one wall that faced the main room with glass windows halfway up and blinds that could be pulled down. I mostly left the blinds up unless one of the prisoners or guards became too interested in our conversation. 

Other isolated rooms were also available for use away from the housing unit and I went to these especially if the client were in a segregated housing unit (the SHU) or if I had arranged a meeting that was not one that s/he would want other inmates to know about. For example, if we were meeting with a sensitive individual such as an investigator, a mitigation expert, or a government attorney.  The process in visiting prisons was quite different, a topic I shall cover another day.

Artwork by Glynn B. Cartledge

Don’t Lie to me Boy Jail Cell

Little Eyes Open Wide

I began the P2P series long ago by making pictures of friends and former clients who had been incarcerated and then would spend one to three months painting them. The below image is one of the first. The subject is now a long term friend whom I cherish.  He was a young man then and now he has grown and moved far away. I spoke with him only days ago hearing he was happy and well, married with children, had many good friends, and loving God. This portrait entitled “Little Eyes Open Wide,” hangs in his house. Looking at a face I know for months of time is an intimate process. So when one of the subjects sees their portrait and their eyes are opened wide, that makes it all worth it.

Artwork by Glynn B. Cartledge

Title courtesy of Laura Wetherington

How the art in my body began

Art has always been a part of my life. My father and mother were painters and collectors. I have been a maker ever since my father enrolled me in my first art class. It was at Miss Iris’s Hale Street basement apartment in Georgia. I was five years old and I have been a maker ever since. After a long career as a criminal defense lawyer, I returned to painting and began studying with established painters and artists. I found my voice by merging those two lifelong interests, criminal justice and fine art practice. I have been fortunate to have good teachers who guided me. My current work began with a series of portraits of former clients. The goal was simple, to paint as I saw them, as fellow human beings who have been dehumanized and even discarded by society. Then I realized that there was a larger multifaceted story to tell, that their voices needed to be heard. I began recording their stories, collecting family snapshots they agreed to share, studying cases, and from there new series began to develop.

The foregoing is part of an interview with Rice • The Contemporary Art Magazine Celebrating Equality and Inclusion, June 2020 issue. To read the complete interview and see all the jail cell collages featured click below.

https://www.rice-initiative.com/rice-mag-vol1

Artwork by Glynn B. Cartledge

Untitled Jail Cell

PREA

Prison rapes, especially in the male population, have always been troublesome and alarmingly frequent. A causal problem resides with all those working and living in institutions. If sent to prison, an incarcerated man faces a 1 in 10 chance of being raped. The Federal Bureau of Prisons in 1992 reported that up to 20% of the population were raped. Yet for decades nothing was done.

Then in 2001, the Human Rights Watch, a research and advocacy group wrote a piece, "No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons.”  In response, in 2003, the United States Congress passed PREA, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which called for national standards to prevent rapes while requiring positive changes in policing and reporting.  The law made rape a top priority. PREA required the DOJ to create a review panel to hold hearings. According to one of the formerly incarcerated men I interviewed in Texas, the law made a difference in the brutal rape culture at his incarceration facility. Though the rapes continued, they were less frequent. 

Photograph courtesy of Jennifer Garza-Cuen

Model: Bobby Regalado

Don't say a word

I have to be quiet. I don’t dare speak. It won’t make any difference anyway while these bare concrete walls contain my body. As I stand beside an open steel toilet attached to a sink I know my words would be meaningless to those in power. Not my skin color though. No money for bail so I stay in this 8’ x 6’ box, which is now my bathroom, my living room, my jail cell.

Partial writing by George White III

My roots are as a criminal attorney

My work, my roots, are as defense counsel while dragging behind me a fractured belief system from a good southern rearing. I walked the halls of prisons, jails, and courtrooms beside beleaguered clients accused of crimes against the government. Seeing broken offerings of justice, power inequities between people accused and the government, unbridled despotism and hubris finally tore the fabric of my idealistic view of the government. Representing international drug dealers, murderers, and Native Americans for a quarter century wore out any fidelity I may have acquired being raised singly by a military father, and not because of the clients, but because of the system. Painting, manipulating fabric, recording historical transcriptions, gathering archival documents and photos, and collaging: these methods are how I record my lost self.

Artwork by Glynn B. Cartledge

Decarceration

Why do we have prisons?  What exactly is the purpose of prison?  Is it to show the prisoners how horrible prison can be so that they will never want to come back?  Is it to provide the best cost service to the government in housing our fellow citizens who have broken a law instituted by a social classism? Is it to provide vindication to society by continually raising the level of distress to the inmates?  Is there really no other solution to breaking social norms other than locking someone in a 6’ by 8’ cage for a number of years? Wouldn’t society — not to mention the “offender” be better off and money better spent in dealing with him/her in a restorative way? Do we care enough to ask?

Artwork by Glynn B. Cartledge

You can't tape this interview

I remember one time the FBI was interested in interviewing a client of mine involving a multi-defendant fraud case in Las Vegas.  The Government charged him with being a member of the conspiracy to defraud insurance companies.  Normally I would never let them interview a client unless we had a plea agreement nailed down tight and I knew as much as possible about the circumstances of the crime and the culpability of my client.  But this case was different. 

A large group of Albanians had devised a criminal scheme with a well-known lawyer and a lesser known chiropractor to fake auto accidents and milk the insurance companies for money.  The lawyer got his 30% contingency payment, the chiropractor got his 20-30 fake visits paid for and all they needed for the scheme to work was to recruit a fresh group of willing participants each week to fake the auto accidents and resulting injuries.  After about a year of these shenanigans, the federal government swooped in and arrested the whole lot of these conspirators – about 120 of them – and began bargaining with them for pleas of guilty.  What the Government wanted was to have the guilty pleas and cooperation of the lesser involved Albanians to reveal the recruiters, the attorneys, and the chiropractors.  And this they did. 

The FBI approached me and offered a plea for something less than the 18 USC section 371 conspiracy to commit fraud. I don’t remember what it was but it would only require that he be subject to probation.  He told me – and I believed him – that he was one of the first in this scheme.  We declined the plea agreement.

My client was a back-seat passenger in a car with five people.  The accident was real but not serious he said.  And then he told how a man had come to the car after the accident was reported and had driven all the people in the car to an attorney’s office whom they were told to hire and then they were taken to a chiropractor.  He went only a couple of times to the chiropractor and then told the chiropractor he wasn’t hurt and wouldn’t be coming back.  They were not happy with him but the lawyers sent in a bill to the insurance company anyway for 25 visits. 

I told the FBI this when they asked for an interview.  We showed up at the FBI office in Las Vegas and sat down at a table for an interview.  No tape.  No camera.  I asked the FBI special agent (they are all special, by the way) if I could record the session and he said no.  I said, “I only want an accurate representation of the interview.  You don’t have a problem with that do you?”  We ended speaking with the special agent and not taping the interview, but the FBI policy not to have the session memorialized was troubling.  The Government eventually dismissed all charges against my client.

Artwork by Glynn B. Cartledge

Challenging myths and stereotypes

My work tackles the conversation around punishment, examining pejorative perceptions of felons.  I challenge the myths and stereotypes given those who have been released from incarceration.  I expand the conversation surrounding the reparations desired by the victims and the public from the formerly incarcerated.  Their dignity, their future, what of that?  I address their present, their past – beyond incarceration – and their future.  By challenging stereotypical, preconceived notions of their worth, I present them as fully human. 

The viewer looks at the compilations of stripped down versions of these fellow humans as exhibited in the paintings, the viewer reads their archival documents, and s/he hears their oral histories, with a new ability to rethink the former inmates’ relatedness. 

Artwork by Glynn B. Cartledge

Punishment means a deprivation of liberty

Ninety-five percent of those incarcerated in prison (97% of those incarcerated in jail) will be released and their criminal status will impede successful reentry.  We want them to be successful not just for society’s sake, but also for the sake of our fellow human beings, those who have been incarcerated.  So helping them and treating them as neighbors is a benefit to all.  It is also just; they have served their time and are now in need of help to become an integral part of their community.

Incarceration is defined as deprivation of liberty and should mean only that, but reentry tells us that it is more; it is also deprivation of social and personal growth.  

The United States locks up over 2 million citizens. DOJ estimates that over 600,000 are released each year, though the number is significantly higher if jail releases are included. We want these fellow citizens to contribute positively and become productive members.  We do not want them to reoffend.  Even so, prisons insure the inmates will come out in poor health and angry; prisons prepare their wards for failure and re-incarceration. 

Prisons show little heed to physical, mental, educational, or vocational needs. The housing is designed to humiliate the offender:  they are housed in an 8’ x 10’ bathroom.  Prisons feed the inmates food that is notoriously bad and will not sustain a normal adult. Whenever I visited  a client in Ely State Prison in Nevada, we would meet in a large cafeteria like room with tables and vending machines.  The client always would ask for me to buy him “real food” out of the vending machines. At another prison in Nevada, one of the minimum security prisons, they would feed each man on $1.50 a day.  I would always see the deterioration of their health over time.  Education and positive stimulation were other problems.  Non-existent in the prisons I know. which is every prison in Nevada and Jackson State Prison, the maximum state prison, in Georgia.

Reentry says much about what incarceration is and what it is not.  Because of what prisons have meant societally and historically, reentry requires much of those coming out of prisons and they are ill equipped to deal with the stressors they meet upon leaving.  They must re-establish family relationships, reenter a truncated job market, and relearn how to be a community member.  Many ex-prisoners develop serious health issues and often chronic conditions like diabetes, Hepatitis C, asthma, as well as mental issues.  What can we do to allay some of this distress for those who have indeed already paid for their crimes?  The first step is simple recognition that they are our fellow citizens and they have paid.  Separation from society is the punishment; further punishment beyond that is not required.  The second, which is harder to do, is to understand that formerly incarcerated are often victims themselves of violence and trauma. 

That is where I will leave it for today.

Case from the files of Glynn B. Cartledge, Esq.

You don't really need to contemplate killing someone for it to be first degree murder

The instructions below were actual jury instructions in murder cases in Nevada, where I practiced and represented 6 men on Death Row. The instructions told the jury that the defendant does not need to premeditate a murder for it to qualify as a first degree murder. The defendant only has to have an “instantaneous” thought of murdering the person. It is unclear how this instant thought qualifies as any kind of premeditation. Further troubling, the instructions did not define deliberation, which is an entirely separate and required element of first degree murder.

INSTRUCTION NO. 12:

Premeditation need not be for a day, an hour or even a minute.  It may be as instantaneous as successive thoughts of the mind.  For if the jury believes from the evidence that the act constituting the killing has been preceded by and has been the result of premeditation, no matter how rapidly the premeditation is followed by the act constituting the killing, it is willful, deliberate and premeditated murder.

INSTRUCTION NO. 20:  

Murder of the Second Degree is murder with malice aforethought, but without the admixture of premeditation.   All murder which is not Murder of the First Degree is Murder of the Second Degree.

Jury Instruction from the files of Glynn B. Cartledge, Esq.

My name is felon

He wore the moniker felon as he sauntered up the steps to his halfway house on the outskirts of his former neighborhood. He now had no right to decent employment. No protection from usurious fines.  No citizen identity. He was an outlaw. Having been subjugated by the criminal justice industrial complex, he now was going to be segregated by his neighbors.

Artwork by Glynn B. Cartledge

Why I care about the formerly incarcerated

An artist who served as defense counsel for over 25 years, I am concerned with the moment convicts experience freedom.  They go to prison, serve their time there, and then ninety-five percent of them release back to their neighborhoods.  Only the most dangerous of inmates stay incarcerated in prison indefinitely. 

But instead of being thought of as having paid for their crimes, the formerly incarcerated are punished by society and the criminal justice system.  I’m not talking about the negative residuals they carry for having been incarcerated and separated from their families; but rather, I am speaking to the restrictions and impediments to successful reentry that they face.  Unsanctionable shackles of dehumanization.  Monetary fines and fees with no nexus to justice.

The mechanisms vary, but in over forty states the newly released are billed for a public defender; charged room and board for incarceration; and, must pay for electronic monitoring that they are ordered to use. Many employers ban them from employment; others make them reveal their felon status in job applications.  They often cannot be teachers, acquire professional licenses, serve in the armed forces, or work for government agencies. They cannot be policemen or hold office. Equal housing for them is non-existent. My hope is that we can treat fairly those who reenter society.

Photograph courtesy of Raymond Garcia III