Photographer Spends 10 Years Chronicling Women Serving Life Sentences in America

A photographer spent over a decade documenting ladies convicted of murder and sentenced to life in jail within the U.S. — difficult the concept they are often outlined by a single act.

Former public defender turned photographer Sara Bennett’s intimate portraits of girls serving life sentences, taken over 13 years, kind a brand new guide referred to as Looking Inside: Women with Life Sentences (revealed by Kehrer Verlag). Bennett’s guide explores the complexity and humanity of girls who’re, and have at all times been, greater than the one act that despatched them to jail for all times.

Her long-term mission traces the ladies’s lives throughout time and area: inside jail partitions, of their post-incarceration bedrooms, and as they re-enter the skin world after many years behind bars. Through tender portraits and private ephemera, akin to Polaroids, letters, drawings, and handwritten notes, Bennett creates a layered narrative that provides a uncommon perspective, resisting stereo- kind.

According to a report by Huck Mag, Bennett’s images grew out of her expertise as a public defender, the place she turned more and more troubled by the circumstances inside prisons and the prison justice system. The mission started in 2009 whereas Bennett was working professional bono on the clemency case of Judith Clark, who was serving a life sentence at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women for her position within the 1981 Brink’s armored automotive theft that killed two cops and a safety guard.

While getting ready Clark’s clemency utility, Bennett photographed 15 ladies incarcerated alongside her. The portraits accompanied written testimonies describing Clark’s contributions in jail, together with her advocacy for HIV-positive inmates and packages supporting incarcerated moms.

“I began photographing because I was deeply frustrated with the criminal legal system,” Bennett tells Huck Mag. “I believed that if judges, prosecutors, and legislators could see people who have been convicted of serious crimes as individual human beings, they would rethink policies that lock them away forever.”

Clark’s sentence was commuted by then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2016, and he or she was launched from jail in 2019. Bennett later left her profession as a public defender to concentrate on images, writing, and advocacy. The publication is complemented by a strong afterword by Clark, who served 38 years in jail and is now Director of the Survivors Justice Project.

Looking Inside: Women with Life Sentences by Sara Bennett will be bought here.