"Why does the US have 5% of the world’s population but 20% of the inmates?". This powerful question heads one of the 30 posters from a public art exhibition who will tour the country in the coming months to denounce the "mass incarceration" and try to reverse this "drama".
The Guerrilla Girls artist collective offers in that same large poster located in the streets of Miami one of the keys to the situation: African-Americans are incarcerated longer than whites "for the same crimes".
The project of the non-profit organizations SaveArtSpace and Art at a Time Like This comes to focus on the fact that, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), since 1970 the prison population in the US has increased by 500% and close to two million people are in jail.
The project’s journey began in Miami, the main city of a state with prison population figures much higher than the national average, and it did so very close to two key buildings: the courts and the local police.
Florida has an incarceration rate of 795 per 100,000 people (compared to the national average of 664), the highest figure in "any democracy in the world"denounces the non-profit organization Prison Policy.
Jail for being poor
One of the artists involved in the project, Faylita Hicks, was jailed for paying a $25 bad check at a grocery store. She had to spend 45 days in preventive detention for not being able to pay bail pending trial.
"There is something terribly wrong with a country that jails people for being too poor to pay for food, or they are too poor to pay for a lawyer or to post bail"he argued in statements to Efe.
Hicks is part of this public art project that goes by the name "8×5" in reference to the average surface of the cells of the American prisons, of eight by five feet (of 2.4 by 1.5 meters).
Good part of the six artists who joined this first stop of the project resorted to official data to draw attention to the subject.
Anne Verhallen, curator of the project and co-founder of Art At A Time Like This, stressed to Efe the importance of presenting these numbers, taking them to the streets, so that ordinary citizens are "aware of what the problem really is"that him "mass incarceration is one of the greatest crises" from USA.
To do this, they bought advertising space at 15 bus stops and 15 billboards located on large streets and thoroughfares in the city, from which they shoot pedestrians and drivers point-blank with data, with the intention of stirring up consciences and instigating a dialogue with which "finding solutions".
This was done by Shepard Fairey, responsible for the graphic campaign "Hope" for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, which highlighted on its poster that 70 million of the 330 million Americans have criminal records.
And Sam Durant denounced in his piece that the "90% of defendants must take a plea deal or risk waiting years in jail for their trial date".
Like Hicks and Durant, artist Sherrill Roland used the question-answer model.
"Did you know that Florida is home to more than 170,000 prisoners with a margin of error of 10%?"that is, about 17,000 are in prison without being guilty of the crime for which they were convicted, highlighted this artist who also had to suffer time in prison.
unfair justice
After trying to spark debate in Miami about the US criminal justice system the project will travel until 2023 through New York, Houston, Los Angeles and Washington.
Always with the idea of ​​placing these billboards near the courts and government offices to provoke a reaction in the main actors involved in the "mass incarceration".
"We think that the artists are very much the main leaders of the solution" when viewing reality or even how things could be if action is taken, Verhallen stressed.
As in Florida, in the other cities there will be local artists and a regional focus on the judicial situation.
In his work, Hicks paraphrases the Declaration of Independence to recall that this almost sacred document for Americans ensures that all citizens are "created equal and endowed with rights"among them the "freedom"all this on a photograph of a young man whose eyes are covered by the distorted flag of the country.
The artist explains that the purpose of its creation is to talk about the need for judicial reform that prevents people from being incarcerated for minor crimes.
"America really is making people disappear on a very large scale"says this artist who in her work covers the eyes of a young African-American to remember that Justice "She’s supposed to be blind, she’s supposed to be fair, but she never is".