In A Whole New Way: Undoing Mass Incarceration by a Path Untraveled

In a Whole
New Way is a
photographic self-portrait by New Yorkers who are serving a term of probation.
The book also lifts the veil on this “second-chance” justice intervention that has
spread from its origins in 1841 Boston to most of the world today.

 

If all Americans
serving a term of probation were gathered in one locale, they would constitute
the third-largest city in the country. Yet few of us understand what the
sanction involves. Nor do many Americans realize that the originally
rehabilitative practice became punitive following the 1972–92 crime wave. In
many jurisdictions, it still is. Probation unfortunately has become a staging
area for incarceration rather than its alternative.

 

In a Whole
New Way shows how
hundreds of determined city residents on probation, along with neighborhood
allies, undertook to change this. Equipped with cameras and new artistic sensibilities
provided by the editors’ nonprofit Seeing for Ourselves, they set off in
a whole new way to reform the sanction of probation, returning it to the
rehabilitative and positive program it was originally intended to be. In the
process, they found themselves transformed.

 

The result of
their journey is this unique collection of stunning photographs, accentuated by
deeply personal captions and lengthier testimonies, that reveal the reality of
life in probation. The stories of these participants powerfully undercut their
own—and probation’s—derogatory popular image. The true goal of this book is to
reform the entire justice system toward decarceration.

 

In a Whole
New Way is both the
sequel to the editors’ Project Lives (2015), the globally acclaimed
volume resulting from a similar effort with New Yorkers living in public
housing—a work catapulting Seeing for Ourselves to the front tier of
“participatory photography” practitioners worldwide—and the source of today’s
award-winning eponymous documentary film, airing on select public television
stations in 2023.