Prisoners' Inventions

by Joel Score, Temporary Services

Imagine that your house spans six by nine feet, your mattress is just two inches thick, you are known to your neighbors by an identification number, and items most consider crucial to everyday existence are outlawed. How do inmates in prisons like this throughout the United States make such lives bearable?
In 2001, the artists' collective Temporary Services asked an incarcerated artist named Angelo to share with them the ways in which inmates adapt to their confinement. Angelo responded with over one hundred pages of meticulously detailed ink drawings and text. The resulting compilation, Prisoners' Inventions, is a unique guide to prison life, covering subjects ranging from how to cook a grilled cheese sandwich in a locker to how to chill a soda using a toilet. Many of the documented items—such as cigarette lighters, condoms, even alarm clocks—are considered contraband, and Angelo includes anecdotes describing their creation and use.
Already featured in Playboy, Harper's, Le Monde, and on This American Life, Prisoners' Inventions provides powerful testimony to life "on the inside" as it is endured by over two million individuals in the United States alone.

Genres: Nonfiction, Art

119 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2005

Reviews

[Salem · Rating 5 out of 5]

My group, Temporary Services, collaborated with Angelo to create this book as well as a sometimes-traveling exhibition of recreated inventions and a life-size recreation of Angelo's cell.

It has been my privilege to work on this project and help reinforce the concept that creativity and invention can happen in the most confined and dire circumstances.

This book is out of print. My collaborators and I do not make any money off of speculative auctions ($100 copies on AbeBooks, etc), just so you know.

We hope to have another edition out in the next few years. We have more material to share with you.

If you'd like to talk to us about presenting the exhibition:

http://www.temporaryservices.org

[Suzann · Rating 3 out of 5]

The inventiveness of the prisoners whose inventions are included in this volume shocked me. I think the text is even more interesting than the illustrations. Not to be missed.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written and illustrated by Angelo, this fascinating find describes the creative solutions inmates have come up with to deal with things like cooking, personal hygiene, and cell organization. Diagrams show how things are made and used, and Angelo even offers tips on the likelihood each invention will be confiscated by the guards. Weapons are intentionally left out, but the remaining concoctions are amazing. I never knew you could do so much with toilet paper!

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first the topic of inventions devised by prisoners can seem a fun, silly pleasure. Upon reading, it is amazing to get a look into the everyday mundane needs that are filled by the various homemade articles. These are far more practical articles like an over-sized cup made of toilet paper, or salt and pepper shakers, than the expected shivs, chargers, or paper-mache heads.

[turt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Filled with mini-narratives of Angelo's life in prison and his many cellmates, this book is equal parts how-to manual and prison memoir. The drawings are awesome. Besides being a really unique perspective on prison life, it's also of interest to anyone who wants to be prepared to make almost anything out of very little. Totally inspiring read.

[Tatiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is so cool, i just hope i never have to use it.