Inmates loom large in portraits, budget
Their stories may be shocking. Their faces are etched with the years they’ve spent behind bars. But photographer Ron Levine sees more than simply the elderly and infirm individual inmates he’s been photographing since 1996.
“This is the future of the prison system,” says the Montreal native, who has shot the men and women of the U.S. and Canada’s aging prison population at institutions such as Vacaville’s California Medical Facility and Louisiana State Penitentiary, a.k.a. Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the nation. “We see it everywhere, and they’ve started geriatric units in prisons.”
The incarcerated elderly are given faces in “Prisoners of Age,” now on view in the eerie New Industries Building at Alcatraz, where the photo exhibit debuted 15 years ago. Today 60 portraits of aging prisoners loom large at 8 by 12 feet throughout a sunlit space — the work drawn from primarily 2004 to 2014. Barriers lined with fractured windowpanes lend an unsettling symbolism to the inmates’ stories of murder, robbery, sex crimes and abuse.
Since 2000, the show has traveled internationally to Australia and Ireland. Levine, 57, has continued to photograph subjects for this selffinanced passion project, produced a companion book and video interviews and been the subject of a 2005 documentary.
In the meantime, this country’s elderly inmate population has grown dramatically: Human Rights Watch has reported that the number of prisoners ages 65 and older in the U.S. has increased 63 percent between 2007 and 2010. NBC News estimates that it costs $16 billion a year to care for those elderly convicts, taxing an already overburdened system.
“People have started to understand that we’re spending a massive amount of money to keep these people in — not just people who were put in for drug crimes but elderly who have been there for three or four decades for attempted murder or robbery,” says Levine, who makes a case for house arrest, citing the less than 1 percent rate of recidivism among inmates older than 55. “I think these guys who have paid their debt to society should be given a second chance.”