“This is my 27th year being incarcerated,” wrote Linda, in a handwritten note to photographer Sara Bennett in 2019. “I’ve been scared, lonely, hurt, disappointed and forgotten.” Her note ends with a question that runs through the whole of Bennett’s new book: “Will I die behind these walls??????????”
Linda was 70 at the time. Bennett photographed her in the recreation room for the medically unemployed at Taconic Correctional Facility in Westchester County, New York State. Three years later, she was released.
Her story is one of dozens featured in Looking Inside: Women with Life Sentences, published by Kehrer Verlag. Across 256 pages, it brings together more than a decade of work by Bennett, documenting women convicted of homicide and sentenced to life in New York State.
Earlier in life, Bennett worked as a public defender. Today she uses her skills as a photographer to draw attention to the problems of mass incarceration. Her work has been shown at MoMA PS1 and the Museum of the City of New York, and in 2024 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Her book depicts imprisoned women inside prison, in the bedrooms they move into after release, and as they try to rebuild their lives in a society that's often very different from the one they remember, pre-jail.
Aisha, who served 25 years before her release in 2016, offers a typical example of this culture shock. “I was arrested when I was 19 and being in this big, unfamiliar, advanced world makes me feel like a 19-year-old trapped in a 45 year old body; like putting a kindergartener in college,” she told Bennett.
Striking portraits
They're striking words, and Bennett's portraits are equally striking. In one, Judy, 69, sits alone in the nursery at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, beneath a mural of Winnie the Pooh, a Christmas tree glowing beside her. She'd been in jail since 1981, when she was 31.
Another shot captures Assia, as she stands among boxes for baby clothes in the prison’s storeroom. Next to the picture, we see pages from a hand-drawn book Assia made for her children, marking their first prison visit.
“I can’t believe how beautiful it is in here,” reads one caption. “I hope my children think the same.” We also see personal items the prisoners shared with Bennett, including letters, drawings, handwritten notes and Polaroids.
Life on the outside
Later sections of the book follow women when they return to society. Karen is seen in a homeless shelter in 2017, a month after being released from a 35-year prison stretch. Another photo, later in the same year, shows her on the Staten Island Ferry, on her way to work as a paralegal.
Jennifer, 40, sits cross-legged on the bed in her own Brooklyn apartment, 15 months after her release. Veronica, 53, sits with Vernon, her husband of 29 years, in their apartment in Queens, 21 months after her release.
What's remarkable about these images is how effortlessly they resist easy stereotypes. As the press release puts it, they’re “a striking reminder of the complexity and humanity of women who are, and have always been, far more than the single act that sent them to prison for life”.
The book concludes with an afterword by Judith Clark, who herself served 38 years in prison. She now directs the Survivors Justice Project, which fights for decarceration through the implementation of New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act.
Looking Inside: Women with Life Sentences by Sara Bennett is published by Kehrer Verlag and costs $58 / £45. Bennett’s work will be shown at Baxter St at CCNY in New York from February 03 to April 07 2027, and at Bader & Simon in Cincinnati from May 01 to June 08 2027.
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