Vintage polaroids of female prisoners paint an intimate picture of womanhood and identity kraken14 at
What is perhaps most striking about the 32 photographs that make up Jack Lueders-Booth’s new book, “Women Prisoner Polaroids,” is the intimacy that occupies each frame. Inmates wear their own clothes and pose in cells embellished with personal effects, much like any regular college dorm room; one woman clasps a biography of Mick Jagger, others are pictured with their arms wrapped around friends. A warm sensibility, typically foreign to portraits of incarceration, is notable throughout.
“Miriam Van Waters, the first superintendent at Massachusetts Correctional Institute Framingham (in 1932), was insistent that they not use this unfortunate period in their lives to form their identity,” the photographer told CNN in a video interview, relaying the Massachusetts’ prison’s early objectives. “To foster that, she tried to make it look like home. For that reason, (when I was there) the inmates wore domestic clothes and prison guards were also un-uniformed. Often the same age as the prisoners, many of them were studying criminal justice at Northeastern University, a co-operative college.”