USA: no license plates here, using art to transcend prison walls

More than most artists, the men who gather twice a week for mural class in the B Facility are accustomed to darkness.

But the scene they are creating — a tropical rain forest — requires color and light, elements in short supply at Salinas Valley State Prison.

“I don’t have much of a legacy,” Jeffrey Sutton, who is serving 41 years for armed robbery, said of his life. “This is something positive that helps me focus on getting out,” he added, daubing flecks of green onto the leaves of a jungle vine.

The mural class for high-level offenders is part of a new initiative by the State of California to bring the arts — including Native American beadwork, improvisational theater, graphic novels and songwriting — to all 35 of its adult prisons, from the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near the Mexican border to Pelican Bay, the infamous supermax just shy of the Oregon line.

In a political climate in which federal arts agencies are under siege, the state has allocated $6 million annually for the Arts in Corrections program, a figure set to rise to $8 million next year.

Unlike most prison arts programs across the country, which rely on volunteers, this one — a partnership with the California Arts Council — hires respected artists, like Guillermo Aranda, a Chicano muralist who teaches four classes weekly at Salinas Valley. The teachers’ commitment requires them to relinquish their keys and cellphones before clearing heavily monitored security points — and to keep their cool if their class is unexpectedly canceled because of a lockdown.

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