Representative Mike Sells [D] 38th Legislative District of Washington State, has proposed that the state exempt prisons from the state requirement that one percent of budgets for state building projects be dedicated to public art. This would, for example, put an end to such luxuries as mobiles of birds hanging from prison common-room roofs.

Mr. Sell,

Now there's a great idea - deprive prisoners of art. Make sure their minds stay benighted, while they're inside. All the research shows that every other brutality is done to them, already, so you can claim, I suppose, to be capping off prison reform in the 21st century, sending it right back to the 18th, that period of great enlightenment.
Small-minded, I'd say. If your rationale is to save taxpayer money, then perhaps you could put them all on diets of 800 calorie a day. But wait, that might permit them to live longer. What is cheaper: window panes, or more bricks, or pre-cast wall slabs? And lights out at dark - save on lights. Give them nothing that requires electricity, for that matter. There's no end of innovations that you could champion.

Sincerely,

RESPONSE:
I would hardly equate feeding prisoners with the public expenditures for
art that the public really cannot see, or for that matter the prisoners
and sexual predators, in the case of MacNeil Island, probably really
can't enjoy either due to where they may be incarcerated. I simply feel
that public art displays should be just that--for the public. And, as I
noted to KIRO interviewers, I believe it is appropriate to have
prisoners do art as part of their therapy, not necessarily at public
expense. In a time when we have $2.1 billion budget short fall, a need
to fund class sizes at the K-12 level as well as teacher salary
increases, a need to fund access to a greater degree for higher
education, a need to honor contracts for homecare workers and other
state employees who haven't had a raise in 4 years, funding for the
developmentally disabled programs, a transportation system that has
poorly maintained roads, crumbling bridges and viaducts and severe needs
to fund transit, we need to make sure we have our priorities in order.
Currently, we have precedent in exceptions for the art part of the
construction budget on bridges. To me, it would be more appropriate to
have art associated with that part of the construction budget.

Respectfully,
Mike Sells, Representative, 38th District


RESPONSE:

Mr Sells,

Thanks for your reply, and your points are all well-taken (although it seems to me that excluding bridges from the public-art levy is a mistake - witness the horrible design of bridges like the 1st Ave addition). But as you point out, yourself, it's all a matter of priorities, and of the definition of public.

On the latter point, it seems to me that at a time of unprecedented levels of incarceration of the public, placing public art in prisons so that the public - prisoners and their visitors - can see it is only appropriate.

Second, on the issue of priorities, it seems a very poor prioritization that places the sustained humanization of prisoners, and their rehabilitation to greater notions of social life, below any of the other priorities you nominate. Why is providing for teachers, schoolchildren, and SUV owners any less a priority than providing humane settings for "criminals and sexual predators," where the former includes untold numbers of youths who have become victims of puritan-minded drug laws, let alone of draconian policing activity that targets minority youth? In a purportedly, grandly self-proclaiming Christian society, shouldn't we also be according even the worst offenders with the kind of conditions that sustain their humanity, rather than subject them to a return to the 18th-century conditions that we now find deplorable, even as we are able to turn a blind eye to their repetition in new forms - such as the ones you propose to abet?

Sincerely,