- So it's time to quit ignoring history and set our minds on the right track and to demand the rights of full citizenship in this age of the patriarchy.

My name is Leonard C Jefferson.

I am a artist, musician, a poet, a author and a dad, a granddad, a great-granddad.

(smooth jazz music) The evidence speaks for itself, but nobody looks at the evidence.

The jurors didn't look at the evidence.

Like I'm saying, when the prosecutor points at you, and especially if you are a person of color, right, the jury rolls right along with them.

(bright jazz music) (bright jazz music continues) (bright jazz music continues) The landlord in the house where I was living was, they say, robbed and killed during the robbery.

And the police came, of course, and they arrested Black people in the house basically, myself and another guy.

I was sentenced to life imprisonment, I served from 1973 till 1985.

(bright jazz music) I was confronted with a trespasser in my house late at night and I ejected the trespasser and she told the police that I had assaulted her, which was not true.

And they convicted me literally in a couple minutes.

In Pennsylvania, if you have a life sentence, you are never eligible for parole.

And from that point, I spent the next 26 years imprisoned.

The inspiration from my art came from me refusing to allow my mind to be trapped in prison.

They had my body, but not my mind.

If you allow them to trap your mind in prison, you're done.

And my imagination was never behind the walls.

I was drawing before I went to kindergarten.

I always, probably from before I can remember where I was drawing.

I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and they have the Three Rivers Art Festival and my mother took me there.

Unfortunately she died when I was 13, so this was probably when I was about nine or 10 was the first time we went down there and I was exposed to art, painting.

Definitely I am self-taught.

I have not gone to any schools and I'm kind of like shocked and amazed when people ask me, "What school did you go to"?

And even some people ask me, "Do you teach?"

"Where did you teach?"

I'm like, "Wow, not me".

I'm like a trial and error guy.

If I see something or something in my imagination, I just pull it out and paint it or draw it.

I've never had a live model, but I've worked from photographs, "National Geographic", they have like excellent photographs.

That's what I worked from when I was in prison a lot.

Back in the day, the ACI, especially maximum security, everyone was really busy creating things.

They had woodworking shops and these were ran by prisoners themselves.

They had a program that's called Arts-In-Corrections, where they provided material for prisoners to work with.

They had a lot going on.

And so, I just kinda like fell right into that.

Being busy is very important, right?

When you run outta stuff to do in prison, you get in trouble.

And what do they say "Our hands are the devil's workshop"?

Yeah, so I tried to stay busy in my art, and the music gave me something to do, positive all the time.

This song is about seeking the truth and speaking the truth.

♪ Ain't no time for playing ♪ ♪ You know what I'm saying ♪ ♪ Get busy and get your heart right ♪ ♪ And seek the truth ♪ ♪ And speak the truth ♪ I actually had a situation where I was in maximum security for literally my entire time at the ACI between 1973 and 1985.

They shipped me to minimum security, but when I went to minimal security, they told me that I could not have my art equipment.

So I said, "Okay, put me back in max".

And that's what they did.

They put me back in maximum and I resumed painting.

Some of my pieces express and explain what happened in my cases.

Like this piece here, it's called "I am D. Law".

It's what I experienced in Pennsylvania.

The judge, he's urinating on the Constitution, he's urinating on the Bible, he's urinating on everything that's supposed to be held holy, everything that should be respected in law.

All they need against people of color in courts is an accusation, no matter how ridiculous it is.

I wound up doing 26 years on an accusation like that.

The system is wild.

I paint things that I see that are beautiful.

So, you know, it's not all protest art, it's not all protest art.

Some of it is, yes.

I mean I guess I'm like kind of like everyone else in the country, right?

With the advent of cell phones and cell phone videos and you see the police killing people on television.

I mean, Luquan McDonald being shot 16 times for walking away in the street and they have actual, that's not just shocking, I felt like the bullets were hitting me.

That's the way I feel that the people's pain, I see something, I couldn't walk past the person who was going through something painful and not feel for that person.

That's just being a human, I think.

Seeing this stuff going on, not commenting about it or not having it reappear in my artwork, I think that's kind of impossible.

It's still a major part of my message 'cause I'm involved with community organizations like this DARE, Direct Action for Rights and Equality, and I do artwork for them, a lot of posters and signs.

- There are, what is it, 75, 79 million people in the United States right now who have a loved one who has been directly impacted by the carceral system.

That means one in five.

I'm Lisa Biggs, I'm an assistant professor at Brown in the Africana Studies department.

(bright jazz music) (bright jazz music continues) We wanted to have an exhibition that would really set a new tone on campus.

Brown is not known for doing advocacy in terms of prison and incarceration work.

We saw Marking Time as an opportunity to take that work, that scholarship, that advocacy, that is bubbling on campus to a new level.

Students who didn't know anything about the carceral system, they got to learn about it through all these different perspectives from different artists.

There's that myth about people behind bars being bad and outsiders.

The myth silences people with deep and real knowledge about the limitations of our society.

But people who have lived on both sides of the prison door, they have tremendous knowledge that they can share with the rest of us.

And that I would argue we tremendously need.

(bright jazz music) (bright jazz music continues) - When I came in contact with Dr. Lisa Biggs and she mentioned that Marking Times was coming to Brown, it's from mid-September to mid-December of 2022, right?

And suggested that I have some work in there.

I guess I imagine any artist would feel good to have his stuff on display, to be able to see it and see people's response to it.

I was standing there one day and a woman came up and she looked at this particular painting here and she gasped.

I like, "Whoa".

It hit her that strong.

So to be present it's an experience within itself, but it's good to see how people respond to it.

The art produced by prisoners is relevant or maybe at the center of things because of the general idea that if you want to judge the level of humanity in a society, that is shown by the conditions inside prisons.

In prisons, you see how society treats people, basically.

If you wanna take another person's humanity away from you, you first have to give up your own.

And that's what it would be with the art of prisoners because in prison they count on you, many instances, defeating yourself.

I'm not going to allow these people to take away my humanity or to make me an animal.

You can put me in a cage, but you can't make me an animal.

You can't take away my humanity, I won't allow you to do that.

- There is pain and there is suffering.

But I think what I learned from the exhibit and from the artists is that the arts are a place in which one can do powerful and transformative work, first for self and then to offer it to others so that they can do their own work in the world of healing and change.

I think too often folks consider people behind bars to be stuck, fundamentally bad and irredeemable.

The visual artwork in the exhibit demonstrates that by giving people the chance to deepen their craft, to tell a story, to make work that is meaningful to them and then to be able to share it to the world can be deeply healing.

(bright gentle music) (bright gentle music continues)