‘Our Crimes Are Not Who We Are’

Assia, 35, sentenced in 2003 to 18 years to life, in a storage room for baby clothes at Bedford Hills.

The women in these photographs are all serving prison sentences of 18 years or more to life for homicide. For Sara Bennett, the photographer, this fact is just the beginning of their stories, not the end.

Ms. Bennett, 63, began working with incarcerated women when she was a lawyer at the Legal Aid  Society, specializing in appeals for women who said they had been abused. The work never took her past the visiting rooms at the prisons, she said. For this series of portraits, taken at Bedford Hills and Taconic Correctional Facilities, she wanted to go deeper inside of the prison. After some negotiation, she got permission to shoot the women at their workplaces, though not their cells. It gave her a view of prison as a small community. “The lifers all know each other,” Ms. Bennett said. “They call someone ‘my grandmother’ or ‘my auntie.’ Everyone has a job they go to every day. They have co-workers. It’s a society. Sometimes it feels like a secluded community.”

In her photos and conversations with the women, Ms. Bennett said, “I’m asking: ‘Can you do something terrible and still live and meaningful life? Can you understand what brought you to that point and try to give back? Because you can’t undo what you’ve done.”

She added: “The women will be the first people to admit that they’ve done damage. They say, I have to live every day with the fact that I took somebody’s life. It’s a big thing. It defines you forever. It’s part of your daily life. It’s always there. I don’t know if the rest of us carry around something that’s always there.” Most said they had been victims of abuse, she said. Beyond that, she did not ask how the women landed in prison. She was more interested in their lives now, with a possibility of never leaving prison.

“How do you find meaning in a life where you may never see the outside world?” she asked. “It’s kind of the core of someone.”

The women she photographed — sometimes just for five minutes, sometimes for half an hour — were “some of the deepest-thinking people I’ve ever met in my life,” she said. “They’ve come from poverty, often drug abuse, physical abuse. They come to prison, and it’s sometimes the first safe environment they’ve had, and you see how people just blossom. It’s such a loss to society. That’s the thing I feel the most.”

She quotes a woman named Gloria, 53, who was sentenced in 2000 to 20 years to life: “My life as a woman and mother ended at the age of 35. I am painfully aware that my family has their own lives in which I no longer have a place. I am still a normal person. I haven’t yet developed the mentality of a prisoner. And yet this is how I am treated and will continue to be treated until I am set free. “How can anyone appear normal after such suffering?” As a prisoner named Taylor said, “Our crimes are not who we are.”