Still Doing Life

Country: USA

Participants: Men and women serving life sentences

Cyd Berger
‘There’s no single description of an inmate because we are people… Inmate is a word that the prison system gives us, but that’s not who we are.’
Photos taken 25 years apart © Howard Zehr

Howard Zehr, Professor of Restorative Justice at the Center for Justice & Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University in the USA, has built his career around the concept and practice of restorative justice as well as working as a photographer. He is an advocate for the importance of the arts in restorative justice work.

Restorative justice rests on the idea that because a crime hurts, justice should heal those who are affected by the crime, those who committed it, and communities as a whole. The concept is a relational, whole-person approach to justice that emphasises relationships, responsibility and accountability, which are often neglected in legal systems focused on rights. It prioritises dialogue and interactions between those affected by an injustice to decide what should be done to repair the crime. With justice lying at the heart of positive forms of peace, Zehr’s work has sought to develop a more nuanced understanding of justice in the field of peacebuilding.

In a number of his photographic projects, Zehr has adopted a visual approach he calls respectful portraiture with which he deliberately attempts to subvert stereotypes about both the victims and perpetrators of crime. He purposely sets out to create non-stereotypical portraits which avoid the visual cues that trigger biases. People are photographed against a plain background within a tight frame – the way he himself would want to be photographed. His latest book, Still Doing Life, (with co-author Barb Toews) brings together portraits and interviews with 22 women and men serving life sentences without the possibility of parole in Pennsylvania at two points in their incarceration, twenty-five years apart, in the early 1990s and 2017. In these longitudinal portraits the sitters talk about how they have coped in prison, made sense of their lives and what has stayed the same and what has changed in their years of incarceration.

Zehr meets with people and undertakes extensive interviews with them before taking their portrait at the end of their meeting when a trust and relationship has been built. His aim with the book is to encourage dialogue and to re-humanise those who have committed crimes and are serving life sentences. Zehr has worked on other book projects, Transcending and ‘What Will Happen to Me?  Using the same approach of respectful portraiture with the victims of crime and children with a parent in prison. His portraits of crime victims and lifers have been used in workshops to encourage people to consider our assumptions and biases, and to get a dialogue going around our preconceptions about what victims and perpetrators look like.