"Behind the Razor Wire" creates a visual portrait of prisons and prisoners, and a compelling documentary of how prisoners see themselves and of how in turn they are seen by others.

When Michael Jacobson-Hardy shot these images more than one million Americans lived in federal and state prisons and close to another half million were in local jails. In the meantime these figures increased.

One out of every three young black men is involved in the criminal justice system. To house the ever increasing prison population, the construction of new prisons has become a growth industry in many local and state economies. Yet while prisons are a rapidly expanding feature of America's cultural and political landscape, the people in them, as well as the buildings themselves, remain hidden from public consciousness. Determined to break this silence, Michael Jacobson-Hardy entered the prison system to record the voices and the lives of the people who live and work within its walls.


Behind the Razor Wire continues the tradition of documentary photography by reporting in words and photographs on the conditions in the American prison system. Jacobson-Hardy examines the physical and psychological environments of a range of contemporary correctional institutions and the lives they contain.
The photographs focus on inmates, cells, bars, corridors, gates, doors, work settings, exercise yards, gun towers, cyclone fences, and layers of razor wire. The foreword notes the contrast between the self-possession that characterizes many prisoners and the social dispossession and invisibility they experience individually and collectively as wards of the correctional system. It comments that the psychological impact of razor wire is as powerful as its potential physical impact and asks readers to examine the circumstances that lead individuals to prison and to consider becoming involved with an organization that focuses on prisoners' rights.

The foreword by Angela Y. Davis and essays by John Edgar Wideman, Marc Mauer, and James Gilligan, MD make a searing indictment of America's criminal justice system, while offering a framework for understanding the photographs in their historical and cultural context. They argue that awareness of what happens behind prison walls is a crucial first step in preventing the worst abuses of corrections and realigning it with enlightened notions of justice, rehabilitation, and punishment; explain the history of prisons; and examine violence causes and the role of correctional reform in preventing violence.