Lolita’s Bicycle Speaks

I am grateful for the attention that Ricciardelli paid to the photographs in my book Inside Kingston Penitentiary 1835-2013, and for her thoughtful reading of them. But I am not sure that she read the short essay I wrote about my experiences because she would have found that I dealt with the special stigma attached to being in Kingston Penitentiary—a stigma that she says was overlooked. As I said in that essay, corrections officers frequently referred to Kingston Penitentiary inmates as “the lowest of the low,” and transferees to other prisons were routinely beaten up. When these inmates were sent to neighbouring Millhaven, they did indeed, as she suggested, have a target on their backs, which is why they were segregated in their own ranges. What I didn’t write about are the small cruelties they could face—as in the refusal of Millhaven inmates to sit on a chair in a classroom that had been used by a someone from Kingston Penitentiary. I wish I had been able in my book to answer the ‘glaring’ question she poses: “Given prisoners have no choice but to be shaped by their incarceration, what can be done to make prison a more civilized and rehabilitative place?” This is perhaps something that is beyond the scope of photography, which is best at showing how things look. The most I could hope for was to cast some light onto these dark places.

James was clearly successful in revealing some of the realities of prisons. As I said in my review, he “cast some light onto these dark places.” As for my discussion of the stigma associated with Kingston Penitentiary, I was speaking to his photographs, not his short essay (which I read). I had hoped this was clear in stating “James’s images…” or “As night falls in James’s pictorial account…”  Whether or not it is possible to capture abstract concepts such as stigma in images is something I would trust those with expertise, like James, to determine. In his letter he also cites the rhetorical question with which I concluded my review. Never would I suggest either he or the other author whose book I reviewed, Gary Garrison, provide an answer to how prison can be reformed!