Those in prison may help save the arts

On the outside, AI is increasingly doing our writing, creating our images and subverting creativity.

BY MARK OSLER

Because I run a law school clinic that prepares pro bono clemency petitions for people in federal prisons, I visit those prisons a lot. Not long ago, I was inside Sandstone Federal Correctional Institution, a low-security prison a couple hours north of my home near Minneapolis. FCI Sandstone is exactly what you expect a prison to look like, with long tall fences surrounding dull yellow buildings outside of a small town, huddled near a freeway. I was there with some of my students, and we were offered a tour of classroom and workshop areas led by prison officials and Luke Keller, a man doing time for narcotics offenses who has done remarkable things while incarcerated. Partway through, I stopped abruptly. Before me on a table was something I had not seen in decades: a typewriter.

It was a peculiar one, built to prison specs, with a clear casing so that nothing could be hidden inside. Next to it was a pile of papers, part of a project someone had begun, the top page bearing the marks of swinging steel levers. One of my students came up behind me and asked me, “What are we looking at?” “The future,” I told her. Because it is that kind of tool, and the kind of talent and focus we so often find behind bars, that may just save art forms that are in the early stages of death from a toxic combination of artificial intelligence and commercialization.

While on the outside AI is increasingly doing our writing, creating our images and subverting creativity, on the inside of a prison none of that is happening — and the results can be stunning. That unwired zone behind the walls may just serve as a cultural failsafe.

Creative talent developed in prison is not new. The writer O. Henry was doing time for embezzlement when he began crafting short stories. Oscar Wilde and Fyodor Dostoevsky were incarcerated when they did some of their remarkable writing. More recently, poet Reginald Dwayne Betts began his career in a Virginia penitentiary. In the visual arts, textile master Ray Materson learned his craft using found materials in a prison, while multimedia artist Jesse Krimes began working with images while in solitary confinement. Fulton Leroy Washington may have literally painted his way to freedom — he was granted clemency after President Obama’s White House counsel received Washington’s painting “Emancipation Proclamation.”

What is new isn’t the existence of remarkable talent in prison. It is the decay of the creative world outside the prison walls. To be clear, none of what I argue here should be heard as support for imprisoning more people or for longer terms. As a society we need to move in the other direction. The United States needs to invest in the arts within prisons and encourage more interaction across those walls between writers and artists who are free and those who are not. We also need to free those who have changed their sense of self through the arts, which can be a powerful tool of rehabilitation.

Studies have consistently shown that arts education develops the right side of the brain, which leads to higherorder thinking and (importantly) self-regulation. A leading U.S. prison arts organization, Rehabilitation Through the Arts, found that those who completed their program had a 3% three-year recidivism rate after release, compared to a 60% rate overall.

Arts in prisons is good for public safety. What we will find is that returning artists to society is good for the arts, as well.

It is the unusual AI moment in which we find ourselves that makes that dynamic important.

Those in prison lack the tools and resources possessed by those in freedom. For imprisoned writers and artists, that has traditionally been a handicap. Now, though, it is quickly becoming an advantage.

On the outside, writers and artists are under intense pressure to use AI to create greater efficiency or predictability.

This is especially true in entry-level jobs for creatives, a dynamic which over time will choke off the pipeline of those who break boundaries, the essence of art’s evolution.

And breaking boundaries is exactly what AI cannot do in a human way, given that is built, necessarily, only on past experience.

This influx of AI tools also pre-empts the development of craft by human artisans, those core skills of finding the right word or the right hue or note; AI has begun to do that now, at least outside of prisons.

The impact may not be immediate, but the atrophy is inevitable.

Meanwhile, prison is insulated from that atrophy. The man using that prison-issue typewriter at FCI Sandstone is making mistakes. He is then having to re-type a page or laboriously use correction fluid to fix that mistake. It’s inefficient. It’s hard. But it is also how any of us learn and get better.

The perfect first draft generated in seconds serves many purposes, but not the one most important to our culture: the development of authentic storytelling by people living in the real world. To build the muscle memory and discipline to create great art, flaws and failure are the fuel.

Prison artists have a perverse advantage: their incarceration means they don’t (and can’t) live off the proceeds of selling their work and thus learn their skills free of the commercial imperatives faced by working artists who are not in prison. On the outside, artists face the choice of using AI or possibly being pushed from the field.

A Stanford business school study concluded that when AI art was allowed into a large online platform, it led to “an exit of non-generative-AI artists from the site.” While this may be good for consumers in the short term (at least if they are willing to buy AI art), it is terrible for the bedrock human endeavor of creative expansion of thought and expression.

Minnesota is lucky to have an organization, Art from the Inside, which supports artists who are incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, holding regular exhibitions of their work. Its leaders hope to create a dedicated space for this project that would allow artists who are re-entering society to have a place to work and thrive. It’s exactly what is needed both for those artists and for art.

My own office is full of art made by those in prison. They come in boxes — unasked for and remarkable. In a room full of art, perhaps the best is a ceramic stallion created by Pedro Martinez, incarcerated for life at age 20 for a crime in which no one died. The horse is rearing up, mane flowing, front hooves pawing at the air, eager for freedom.

There is a rare emotion to it — something AI can never provide.

Mark Osler is the Robert and Marion Short Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas.