Tender portraits of women serving life sentences in America

As a public defender, Sara Bennett remembers the stark decrepitude of prison life from the visiting room’s state. With every passing year, visitor bathrooms grew worse, as though neglect were weaponised as a pattern of abuse. Whenever Bennett surveyed the exposed pipes, rusted fixtures, broken toilet seats, peeling paint, and stall doors that would not close, she wondered how much worse it became for prisoners.

The answer came in 2009 while working pro bono for Judith Clark, former member of the Weather Underground and May 19^th Communist Organization (M19). Clark was serving three consecutive 25-to-life sentences at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women for driving the getaway car during the 1981 Brink’s armoured car robbery in Nanuet, New York, that resulted in the death of two police officers and a security guard. During her time in prison, Clark continued her work as an activist in support of HIV-positive prisoners and created prenatal and infant support programs for mothers. 

While working on Clark’s clemency case, Bennett had a flash of inspiration: she would photograph the 15 women who were serving time alongside Clark, and offered written testimonies to her good works for a pamphlet titled Spirit on the Inside: Reflections on Doing Time with Judith Clark that she submitted to the parole board. ​“I began photographing because I was deeply frustrated with the criminal legal system,” Bennett says. ​“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.”

• Read next: In photos: Inmates of the oldest women’s prison in the USA

Making these women visible was an act against erasure, closing the gap between the strength of their words and the mettle of their character. What’s more, it was a winning strategy. In 2016, then Governor Andrew Cuomo commuted her sentence, and in 2019 Clark was released. By that time, Bennett had left her work as a public defender and continued along her path as photographer, author, and activist. 

A decade later, Bennett looks back at the long arc of freedom in Looking Inside: Women With Life Sentences (Kehrer Verlag). ​“I chose to focus my lens on women convicted of homicide and serving life sentences because they are the most hidden and forgotten of all,” Bennett says. When, or rather if, we think of the two million people currently incarcerated in the United States, few stop to consider the reasons 192,164 are women and girls are incarcerated.

• Read next: How teaching in prisons and a new mixtape is inspiring UK rap innovator Jords

Of that number, 6,829 were sentenced to life in prison, their names and histories known to few on the outside. With Looking Inside, Bennett flips the script as she follows women whose life sentences have been commuted and are now charged with rebuilding their lives, often from scratch. Bennett pairs portraits with handwritten passages, giving these women the space to tell their stories on their own terms, while sharing personal artifacts like discharge papers, diplomas, family photos, and drawings. 

When Bennett began the project 14 years ago, the subject of mass incarceration was not part of the public conversation. But times have changed. ​“Many of the women I photograph felt hidden, forgotten, discarded,” she says. ​“Seeing their images and words shared with the world helped them feel less isolated. And some told me that they began to see themselves as role models. That shift in perspective gave them an added incentive to continue to work on themselves and to imagine new possibilities.”

Looking Inside: Women With Life Sentences by Sara Bennett is published by Kehrer Verlag.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

Buy your copy of Huck 83 here.

Enjoyed this article? Follow Huck on Instagram for more from the cutting edge of sport, music and counterculture.

Support stories like this by becoming a member of Club Huck.