Return.
"Did a stretch in prison to be released to a cell."
- House of Unending by Reginald Dwayne Betts
Return is an ongoing project focusing on homelessness among former prisoners. This project aims to explore the overlapping social forces that incarcerate a large percentage of mostly poor Americans. Sentenced to years and decades in one of the world's most retributive justice systems they are released unprepared and unsupported. The majority of these men and women struggle through months or years of a meager existence in a an unfamiliar society, a digital society that looks nothing like the house phone and VCR world they were frozen in; within a society that stigmatizes and demarcates with unshakable labels that severely limit employment opportunities and housing options.
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Done in collaboration with the returned citizens themselves and with still incarcerated contributors who have lent their skills and their vision to this project.
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Analog Bird
Wilmington Delaware
2024
RB
35 years served
Wilmington, DE
2024
"It's a good neighborhood, working class" RB said as his calloused hands swept leaves into a trash bag, a gig he does to make a few bucks throughout the neighborhood. "I live in an 'abando' around the corner". He leaned on his broom as the camera flash captured him during a break from his work.
Mr. Kenneth Hunter
37 years served
Wilmington, DE
2024
"You want to be famous", Mr. Hunter called to me from the van he called home. We spoke about reentry and measured our years in the weird flex we do when we get together. 37 years. He couldn't do the Mission, the mold in the showers, the thefts. He used his SSI check to buy the van when the Y, and every other landlord I could think of denied him a place inside to rest his head.
"Show the world Mr. Hunter" I didn't have to say anything else. Unbowed, still smiling, returned.
Potters Field
New Castle County
Delaware
2024
A potter's field, paupers' grave or common grave is a place for the burial of unknown, unclaimed or indigent people.
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In the shadow of the Baylor's Prison for Women, New Castle Counties Potters Field interns with a simple number on a stone marker, and a newly installed monument with attached names, the unclaimed.