Restoring America’s Second Chance

Ensnaring some three million Americans (about three-quarters male), probation has evolved from a second chance to avoid jail or prison to a sanction actually feeding mass incarceration. Helping to maintain its punitive character has been the media view that granting a defendant a sentence of probation amounts to a slap on the wrist.

Could an arts effort help undo all this?

Our nonprofit, Seeing for Ourselves, equips and trains marginalized communities to take control of their own public narrative by documenting their lives photographically. The practice is known as participatory photography, originating among American aid workers in rural China in 1992.

Our first effort served housing project residents of New York City during 2010-2013, aiming to counter the relentlessly hostile media coverage that over the past generation had discouraged government support and led inexorably to crime and disrepair—generating even worse media portrayals in their wake. Our initiative, centered on a college-level twelve-week course in telling stories with photography, led to the book Project Lives (powerHouse, 2015), which placed stunning new imagery of these communities before millions of eyeballs and encouraged the city and state to resume funding. NYC then asked us to provide the same service to those on probation, whose efforts to leave their pasts behind had been kneecapped by scornful newspaper stories.

With a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in hand, our nonprofit embedded itself in the city’s probation agency during 2018-2021. Recruitment of participants was tough going at first, amid a natural skepticism about motives and staying power. Only one brave soul might turn up for a class in Brownsville, one of the seven underserved NYC communities that most New Yorkers on probation call home. But gradually word of mouth got around. By the time we left the agency at the end of 2021—bequeathing it a fully institutionalized program—some two hundred individuals would occupy the waiting list for the course.

The photography arising from this second effort proved as impactful as earlier. But what we didn’t expect is how the course would come to change entire lives. As one participant concluded, “It made me a new man—into the man that I wanted to be.” The enterprise seemed a heroes’ journey, as—equipped and trained by a photography teacher and kept on the path by neighborhood allies—those who set out on this mission to struggle against negative stereotypes had returned with brand-new imagery to help reset probation’s reputation. Instead of a mug shot, the practice’s brand could be a neighborhood parade of musicians, a girl dancing on a sidewalk, or a row of smiling probation officers offering assistance. By thereby encouraging a more respectful media coverage of probation and a consequent return of the practice to its roots as a second chance, the photographers may have pioneered a whole new way to help undo mass incarceration.

We were putting a book together about this initiative in early 2020 when the pandemic bought the publishing industry to a halt. Although we had never made a film before, we began stitching together pre-existing footage from the project. With the help of a super-talented editor, the documentary A Whole New Way was sent out onto the festival circuit a year later. Although Sundance and Tribeca proved beyond our reach, many smaller festivals around the world snapped it up—testament to the global appeal of the participants and the photography. The film would go on to win over sixty awards.

This summer, the documentary began airing on PBS even as we started screening it for conferences of organizations promoting criminal justice reform. And just last week, the eponymous book was published after all. We’re hopeful that this film/book combination will help build a powerful movement to give probation itself a second chance.