Captured: People In Prison Drawing People Who Should be

by

Abby Zimet, staff writer

Blankfein, gleefully free

In a brilliant project that "shines a light on crimes masquerading as commerce," two activists present "Captured," wherein prisoners convicted of "a whole bucket of crimes" draw portraits of corporate bigwigs whose offenses - fraud, theft, conspiracy, 

manslaughter, public endangerment, trashing the environment - make their puny assaults, armed burglaries and even murders pale.

Undertaken by Jeff Greenspan and Andrew Tider, the two New York City-based activists who last year installed the bust of Edward Snowden at a Brooklyn park, the project imagines the highest levels of corporate leadership being held personally responsible, for once, for their companies’ illegal and often vastly destructive actions. It also seeks to remind us that while both inmates and CEOs are deemed "untouchable" in polar opposite ways, prisoners are people, and corporations still aren't.

Thus do we have the artful mugshots of the CEOs of CitiBank, Nestles, WalMart, Bank of America, Pfizer with their crimes listed below. We have Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein - “mass deception” and “stealing taxpayers money” - drawn by Ryan Gragg, serving 15 years for murder. And BP’s Tony Hayward - "manslaughter" and "environmental crimes" - drawn by Benjamin Gonzalez, serving nine years for robbery.

 The activists turned to Facebook and eBay, which has a section for prison art, to find their artists; when they found they had to pay them through a company that rips off the prisoners in the process, they added its CEO, Ryan Shapiro, to the gallery. The pair considered giving proceeds from a resulting book to corporate watchdog groups, but decided to give to Bernie Sanders' campaign because it "has the most potential (to) actually bring about real reform in how corporations behave." They add that almost all the inmates admitted their guilt during the project: "They weren’t saying, ‘Hey if the (CEOS) are out of jail, I should be'...They were saying justice should be distributed evenly.”

Bank of America's Brian Moynihan (Conspiracy, Fraud, Theft)

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2016/02/18/captured-people-prison-drawing-people-who-should-be