About the Exhibition

States of Incarceration (May 16—August 12, 2017), the first national traveling multi-media exhibition and coordinated public dialogue to explore the history and future of mass incarceration in the United States, travels to Chicago to be displayed at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in collaboration with DePaul University and a New School-led coalition of 500 university students and formerly incarcerated individuals from 20 cities to create the traveling exhibition, which launched in New York City in April 2016.

In the exhibition, a national public reckoning with one of the most pressing issues facing our country, 20 communities explore the deep historical roots of incarceration, share personal stories related to the issue, and strategize ways of enacting policy change. In each location, the traveling exhibition and public programs focus on an issue of incarceration that is unique to that community. For its staging in Chicago, the exhibition includes “What is our Legacy?,” a special focus on Chicago’s history with criminalization, developed through a partnership between two DePaul University courses. Students of Public History: Mass Incarceration and Public Memory created an exhibit panel in conjunction with the Inside-Out Restorative Justice: Engagement with the Prison course held at Stateville Correctional Center. Public History students joined the 12 ‘outside” university students and 12 “inside” incarcerated students to study texts, exchange written essays, and had rigorous discussions about the legacy of the criminal justice system, its impact on lives, families, and communities, together with ways to change that legacy for future generations.

To accompany the traveling exhibition Hull-House presented, Gone But Not Forgotten, a collaborative memorial quilt for individuals killed by the Chicago Police Department during confrontations or while in police custody from 2006 to 2015. In collaboration with the grassroots group, We Charge Genocide, artist Rachel Wallis organized a series of peace circles/quilting circles where participants read the victims’ stories aloud, while creating a hand embroidered quilt in their memory.  Over the last 2 years the circles have provided a safe space where more than 200 people from vastly different neighborhoods and backgrounds could come together and discuss transformative justice, police accountability, and community safety. To date, there are six quilt panels which stretch nearly 40 feet in length and commemorated the lives of 144 individuals. Three of these quilts were on display at JAHHM, and the museum hosted quilting circles and discussion programs throughout the summer.

While national bipartisan support for criminal justice reform grows on Capitol Hill, local communities are deeply divided over how to change the system. In Chicago local grassroots organizers fought for important victories including the closing of Tamms CMAX Prison, a facility for holding men in solitary confinement, by the Tamms Year Ten a coalition of prisoners, ex-prisoners, families, artists and other concerned citizens including UIC faculty Laurie Jo Reynolds.

States of Incarceration at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum continued to engage with its audiences around issues of mass incarceration, criminalization and the carcel state in Chicago and across the country. In 2015, the museum produced the exhibition In To Body In To Wall, a collaboration between Maria Gaspar and 96 Acres, that addressed the walls surrounding Cook Country Jail, the largest jail in a metropolitan area in the United States. In the fall of 2016 JAHHM partnered with UIC Professor Laurie Jo Reynolds to host, The Registry 20 Years Later, the first convening about the unintended consequences of public registries. States of Incarceration and related programs at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum connects Chicago’s local history to national efforts related to mass incarceration.