Ingenuity Helps Prisoners Cope
Noah Shachtman 09.04.03
Locked in a California prison, Angelo needs a cup of coffee. Bad. But electric heaters used to make instant joe are contraband in jail. So his cellmate combines the metal tabs from a notebook binder with a couple of melted toothbrushes and some rubber bands.
Soon, Angelo is sipping Folgers.
The jury-rigged heater is one of nearly 80 improvised items Angelo meticulously diagrams in a new book, Prisoners' Inventions. Working with the Chicago-based art group Temporary Services, Angelo (not his real name) shows how inmates fashion dice from sugar water and toilet paper, dry bologna jerky on jail-house light fixtures, turn hot sauce bottles into shower heads and make grilled cheese sandwiches on prison desks.
"This gives a glimpse into the everyday lives of the outrageous number of people we have in our prison system," said Temporary Services' Mark Fischer, who first started trading letters with Angelo in 1991. "And it's a celebration of the creativity that comes in response to their restrictive environment."
In the movies, "prisoners only create things to escape, get high or kill each other," Fischer notes.
Angelo's objects show a more banal, more human side of locked-down life: one where soda cans filled with rocks become crude alarm clocks and inmates cool their drinks in toilet bowls.
Salt and pepper are only sporadically available in prison, Angelo explains. And when the seasonings are around, "everyone in the know" stuffs their pockets with the little paper packets that hold them. Instead of joining the rush, though, Angelo shows how he turns empty ChapStick containers and Bic lighters into cell-made salt- and peppershakers.
Jerry, Angelo's MacGyver-like pal, goes several steps further. He uses ice-cream sticks, strips of aluminum from soda cans, and glue scavenged from pastry boxes, to construct a deluxe, doubled-ended version (PDF) of the condiment dispenser.
California's strict anti-smoking laws have removed all matches and lighters from many prisons. So "inmates have revived old technologies ... to circumvent such deprivations," Angelo writes.
Ice-cream spoons, paper clips and a saltwater solution can be combined with an improvised electric heater or "stringer" -- for Rube Goldberg's answer to a Zippo. Or pencil leads and paper clips can be jammed into outlets to get an electrical spark. And these can be tied to twisted toilet paper, to light a makeshift wick.
But this is a risky method, Angelo warns. "No matter how careful you are, sooner or later it will trip the cell's circuit breaker," he writes. And that's a problem, considering how seriously inmates take their TV time. "Your Miranda rights mean nothing to some psycho on a life sentence who suddenly finds his baby sitter inoperative."
The improvised lighter is one of 30 objects that have been built from Angelo's descriptions by the Temporary Services art group and a team from the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts.
The items are on display at the museum through next February, as part of an exhibition that explores "how people transform their worlds," said assistant curator Nato Thompson. (Many re-creations of Angelo's designs are also being shown at the Halle 14 Gallery in Leipzig, Germany.) Other highlights of the Massachusetts show, Fantastic, include Nils Norman's re-imagining of a local Kmart as an eco-tourist trap, and Miguel Calderon's Quantum Physics, in which six hippie mannequins stare at a fridge full of Cherry Garcia ice cream.
To Thompson, each of the prisoners' objects "tells a story, points to a situation. They give humanity to people in prison, showing how creative, how desperate they are."
If that's the case, then perhaps the most upsetting narrative is told by Angelo's cell, which the museum's crew re-created according to the inmate's most intricate instructions. Six feet wide by 9 feet long -- for two people -- the cramped quarters show just how spare, how limited life on lockdown can be.
"If some of what's presented here seems unimpressive," Angelo writes, "keep in mind that deprivation is a way of life in prison."
"The devices ... are considered contraband, subject to confiscation in routine cell searches. But inmates are resilient if nothing else -- what's taken today will be remade tomorrow," he added. "And the cycle goes on and on."