In late May, I began looking for ex-offenders in Corpus Christi, Texas to pose as models for the series, P2P, Prisoners to Paper dolls, and to record their stories, and to have them share some personal criminal archives. One such ex-prisoner was Billy. A 6’4”, blue-eyed, sinewy muscled man of forty-eight met me with his twenty-three year old son Shawn, and his lifelong friend and now girlfriend, forty-seven year old, Valerie. Each posed for pictures. Billy wept as he recorded the story he had written about his incarceration and his being on the lam for most of his adult life. Afterwards, we sat at a table and talked, and he laughed heartily, saying, “You know, when I went through diagnostics in the Texas system I was in the same prison where Shawn was a prison guard.” “Yea,” Shawn said, “There he was. In my prison. I knew he was coming into prison but it was something else seeing him there.”

Photograph courtesy of Jennifer Garza-Cuen