Captives

This work is about imprisonment as a manifestation of power and the abuse of power in an unequal society.  These birds are finches.  I chose to make finches because they have traditionally been captives. They were caught in the wild in Britain, to be kept in cages and you can still see them in our pet shops.  The finches are constructed from recycled chicken wire, which is also used to construct cages. Cages appear to be on the increase.  According to the Prison Reform Trust (2014) between 1993 and 2014, the number of prisoners in England and Wales has more than doubled and we have more prisoners than any other Western European Country.  We don’t just imprison convicted criminals in Britain as the recent spate of hunger strikes and riots in detention centre demonstrate.  We also still detain children, in spite of the political rhetoric against this and we imprison vulnerable people fleeing atrocities such as torture and war.  Furthermore, under the Governments current anti-terrorist and laws and terrorism prevention and investigation measures, people can be detained and their movements restricted for long periods of time without being charged with a crime.

The ‘prison-industrial complex’, a term first used by Angela Davis (1997), describes the power wielded by governments and private companies using surveillance, policing, armies and imprisonment as a means of control and pacification to deal with social, economic and political problems.  The cage can be viewed as a symbol of capitalism as a machine, or perhaps supersede it as a more fitting metaphor for the control that capitalism has over our lives today.  On a global capitalist level we could all be viewed as caged.  Are we defined by the limits of our cages?  Campaigns have arisen to counter the growth of imprisonment for example in protest against Britain’s first ‘super-prison’ which is currently under construction in Wrexham.  Designed to incarcerate 2000 people, it creates a market for even more prisoners and in turn new private prisons.  A group of ex-prisoners have recently set up a new group called The Empty Cages Collective, calling for prison abolition and pointing out the class control functions of prisons.  You can find out more about them here,  www.prisonabolition.org

More Caged Birds