With The Warehouse, James Kilgore and Vic Liu counter the tendency to reduce people to stereotypes or mere statistics.
By Greta Rainbow
Hyperallergic
September 15, 2024
You don’t have to be one of the nearly two million Americans currently incarcerated to have an idea of what prison looks like, whether accurate or not. Audiences have long feasted on sensationalized narratives and pop cultural dramatizations, from escape fantasies like Cool Hand Luke (1967) to the acclaimed dramedy series Orange Is the New Black. But with The Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration, published by PM Press in June, co-authors James Kilgore and artist Vic Liu aim to offer a realistic visualization of contemporary life in prison and the complex history of how the US built the world’s largest system of incarceration. Across nearly 200 pages, they layer archival photographs of historic uprisings, graphic charts highlighting demographics and the disproportionate population of Black and Latino people in prison, collages of fear-mongering “War on Drugs” headlines, and illustrations of everyday details described by incarcerated people firsthand.
Now a writer and activist, Kilgore himself spent six and a half years in the California prison system in the 2000s after living as a fugitive in South Africa because of his involvement with a far-left organization. He is clear on his abolitionist stance and frames it in well-researched terms. “The US government spends about $80 billion per year on prisons and jails,” Kilgore writes. “This $80 billion could: build 1,000 high schools; construct 320,000 low-income apartments; pay the salaries of a million nurses; cover the operating costs of 1.6 million wind turbines.”
