Fragile, intimate portraits of California’s imprisoned youth

Two decades ago, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ara Osha­gan entered Los Ange­les Cen­tral Juve­nile Hall. He was vis­it­ing a deten­tion cen­tre for the first time with doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er and teacher Leslie Neale, and despite fight­ing all of his instincts, Osha­gan felt a sense of hesitancy.

“I had a sense of appre­hen­sion actu­al­ly,” Osha­gan recalls. ​“We were going in to pho­to­graph these [juve­nile] pris­on­ers who were tried as adults, sup­pos­ed­ly their crimes were very seri­ous, and they called them vio­lent crim­i­nals. We inter­nalise these things, so [I was think­ing]: ​‘What am I going to run into? Are they going to threat­en me? Am I going to be unsafe?’”

But as he began observ­ing and talk­ing to the inmates, he realised that he had it all wrong. The teenagers joked and played around with each oth­er, as mil­lions around the world at that age do, and Osha­gan found their demeanours instant­ly relat­able. One boy in par­tic­u­lar, called Peter, was read­ing the Wall Street Jour­nal, before sit­ting down at the key­board and play­ing a note-per­fect ren­di­tion of Beethoven’s ​‘Moon­light Sonata’.

“Lit­er­al­ly the night before, I had played the same sonata for my son while I was putting him to bed,” Osha­gan con­tin­ues. ​“See­ing the same music being played in prison com­plete­ly shat­tered this ​‘us and them’ thing – these kids are not real­ly that dif­fer­ent from my own son, or myself. I could have been in there under dif­fer­ent circumstances.”

Peter’s sto­ry, along with pho­tographs of him that the pho­tog­ra­ph­er took, now fea­ture in Oshagan’s soon to be pub­lished mono­graph A Poor Imi­ta­tion of Death. His is one of sev­en sto­ries of young Cal­i­forn­ian inmates, aged between 16 and 20 years old, who were tried as adults despite being juve­niles when they were incar­cer­at­ed, and giv­en extreme­ly long and harsh sentences.

There’s 16-year-old Anait who was giv­en sev­en years and a first-degree mur­der charge for dri­ving her friends to a fight where a bystander was stabbed to death, and 20-year-old San­dra who was giv­en 27 years after a phone card reg­is­tered to her was found at a mur­der scene. Their sto­ries high­light the real impacts of the USA’s mass incar­cer­a­tion sys­tem, and the years of youth lost behind bars for many who had found them­selves (some­times with a stroke of bad luck) on the wrong side of the country’s jus­tice system.

“When you’re young, you try things, you don’t want to lis­ten, you don’t want to be sub­ject to rules and reg­u­la­tions. So if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, you could be impris­oned for 10 years,” Osha­gan says. ​“Being in prison [at a young age] can impact you in a very neg­a­tive way because the sys­tem in there is very ruth­less, you have to belong to par­tic­u­lar groups and pro­tect your­self against oth­er groups, so it’s this seg­re­gat­ed space that can real­ly skew you and how you per­ceive the world.”

The inti­mate pic­tures, tak­en in black-and-white, form a way of human­is­ing these young pris­on­ers, who spend most of their time wear­ing iden­tik­it jump­suits and being iden­ti­fied by num­bers rather than their names. Print­ed along­side the pic­tures are words – writ­ings from the inmates that range from poet­ry to let­ters, and quotes tak­en from con­ver­sa­tions with Osha­gan – that illu­mi­nate their inner per­son­al­i­ties, the tough­ness of life in prison, but also added con­text about their lives that high­light where a lack of sup­port from a young age had led them into dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions. 20-year-old Liz, for exam­ple, was sex­u­al­ly abused by her step­fa­ther from the age of nine, and even­tu­al­ly ran away from home, but was charged with acces­so­ry to mur­der for being present when anoth­er per­son had stran­gled a teenage woman to death in an aban­doned building.

That lack of sup­port is made stark­er giv­en that the vast major­i­ty of those fea­tured in the book are from BIPOC com­mu­ni­ties. ​“Even though the USA has 5 per cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion, 25 per cent of the world’s incar­cer­at­ed pop­u­la­tion is in the Unit­ed States,” Osha­gan explains. ​“In this coun­try that’s got this myth of being a free coun­try, it’s real­ly the exact oppo­site for cer­tain com­mu­ni­ties – it’s the coun­try of incarceration.”

A Poor Imi­ta­tion of Death by Ara Osha­gan is pub­lished by Day­light Books

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