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COPYRIGHT 2001 Texas Monthly, Inc.
Andrew Lichtenstein's photographs of the Texas prison system are an anthropological study of life behind bars.
"I'M TRYING TO SHOW WHAT PRISON LOOKS LIKE TO PEOPLE who've never been there," says photographer Andrew Lichtenstein, who began taking pictures in Texas prisons in 1995. His initial assignments came from European magazines and newspapers, feeding the Old World's fascination with Texas justice, especially the death penalty. But Lichtenstein soon found a much richer world-one that is captured in the photographs that follow. "The story is so much bigger than death row and the death penalty," he says. "The death penalty gets ninety-five percent of the media attention, but there are another 149,000 people in the system." Indeed, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice system has expanded massively in the past fifteen years, going from 19 units to 114. Its population tripled from 1993 through 1995 alone. Lichtenstein found himself going back on his own time, making a couple of trips a year to record life in various unks. "As a photojournalist, you get the feeling that there's so much more going on," he says, "so you want to keep coming back. Plus, I felt that nobody was paying any attention to prisons."
Some of Lichtenstein's most intense experiences involved shooting...
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