In the fall of 1977, Jack Lueders-Booth began teaching photography to
inmates at MCI Framingham, a women's prison. Over the past ten years
that he spent in this establishment, he made a series of polaroid images
in collaboration with the women who lived in the prison. 50 of these images
are presented in this new book, accompanied by oral stories collected at
the era by Booth. Founded in 1878, MCI Framingham was opened for
welcome women incarcerated for giving birth to a child outside
marriage, that is, for having engendered (the crime of Hester Prynne in the
Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter). A few years later
Later, the Framingham Detention Center began incarcerating women
for shoplifting, organized prostitution, consumption and trafficking of
drugs, armed robbery, child abuse and murder. Many
women incarcerated in Framingham were convicted of aiding their husbands or
their boyfriends to commit crimes. In the mid-1970s, the establishment
prison was part of a normalization experiment aimed at mitigating
the psychological consequences of incarceration. In Booth's images, neither
Neither the prisoners nor the guards wear uniforms, the cells look like
dormitories and inmates can furnish and decorate them in a way that respects
guidelines. Male prisoners were introduced, constituting twenty per
hundred of the common population. Many of the prisoners featured in the images of
Lueders-Booth had dependent children who were in the care of relatives or
to court-appointed foster families; they were allowed to
receive a visit from an adult
