'The Innocents' - judgment in art, law and deviancy

What is illustrated in the photographs of The Innocents is the phenomenon that, when the deviant label comes unstuck, social attempts to control crime continue to function just as ever, even though the social explanations for crime that rely upon the label begin to fall apart.

Ronald Jones, another photographed subject, identifies poverty as a precondition for wearing the criminal label. He served eight years of a death sentence for rape and murder, confessing to the crimes after police brutality, and was eventually pardoned after DNA evidence was examined. He said:

You’re not gonna see no rich people on death row, very few of them even go to jail. I have not - to date - seen a rich man go to death row … It’s two types of justice: there’s a poor man’s justice and a rich man’s justice … I was poor and still is. I’ll never be able to feel free. Because as long as I’m poor, the same thing that they did to me in 1985, they can do it to me again.

Each of the photographed subjects cannot be separated from crime and deviancy. Their identity and their life experiences have irrevocably been altered by their having worn the criminal label. For each of these men, their failure to perform the crucial criminal act has no bearing on their social role, or indeed their personal view of themselves. Earl Washington served 17 years of a death sentence, confessing to four sex crimes and murders, even though he could neither identify the race of the victims nor the locations of the crimes. Despite this, his confessions were found to be reliable. Following his acquittal, he said:

I hate myself for going to prison knowing I was an innocent man. At one time I thought it was my fault for agreeing with what the cops said.

Neil Miller is also utterly changed by having worn the criminal label:

Life is better in prison. Because I wouldn’t have the worries that I have now. Sad to say, but it’s true. There are days that I sometimes feel, I really wish, that I was still in jail … It’s good to have freedom, but it’s just too much freedom. I’m not used to this much freedom.

Wearing the criminal label, even falsely, nevertheless turns the labelled person into a docile and self-managing subject, which has become one of the aims of the criminal justice system. Influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, this school of criminology explains how the processes of control become internalised by the individual. Even though these men have not committed the crimes, they have become obedient and self-governing because of the punitive sanctions they have experienced.

Anthony Robinson, who served 10 years of a 27-year sentence for rape, talked about how he now practices self-government:

I keep records and tabs on where I was, what I was doing, how long I was there. It’s a small price to pay for my freedom. I keep general notations, little scraps of paper … My fear is if I stop, it might happen again.

Contemporary fear of crime, and fear of the social explanations of crime, has produced new theories drawing upon now-entrenched obsessions with risk and its management. Actuarial criminology doesn’t seek to discover the causes of crime. It is interested in avoidance and dispersal. New techniques of crime prevention, monitoring and analysis have developed, focussing on security and surveillance. One of The Innocents, Tim Durham, believes that the technologies of surveillance used by the criminal justice system could equally be used by non-criminal citizens to monitor themselves. Durham served three-and-a-half years of a 3,220 year sentence for the rape and robbery of an 11-year-old girl, before being acquitted through DNA evidence.

“When I was released from prison I had considered developing a device that could be worn just like a pager that could be used to track my movements,” he said.

Surveillance captures incremental moments in the lives of everyone. While under surveillance, everyone is a potential criminal. The surveillance machine waits to catch us in the act. And while it waits, it captures us anyway. Criminology has not yet explained what these new machines actually produce, or what they prove, or detailed the value of their evidence. But I wonder if the photographs in The Innocents series initiate a new kind of criminology: one that helps us to understand the citizen who has not committed a crime.