By Jane Nguyen
UC Santa Cruz professor and media artist Sharon Daniel was a guest speaker for UCSB’s Media and Arts Technology Seminar Series.
During the 15th century, Venetians invented “quarantine” as a protection against the plague. In the mid-20th century, Americans created a criminal punishment system based on the model of quarantine in which the poor and people of color are disproportionately isolated and contained, “treated as a pathogen,” says Sharon Daniel, a professor at UC Santa Cruz and media artist.
Now, in the 21st century, the actual pathogen COVID-19, has both exposed and intensified the injustices of the criminal system, Daniel told a UC Santa Barbara audience.
Daniel was speaking as part of UCSB’s Media Arts and Technology (MAT) graduate program’s Seminar Series. She walked through her most recent work, an online interactive art documentary “EXPOSED: Documenting COVID-19 in the Criminal Punishment System.”
In the U.S, the criminal punishment system confines over 2 million people in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe environments where they cannot practice social distancing nor use hand sanitizer, and are subjected to medical malpractice and neglect, Daniel said. Prisoners presenting COVID symptoms were put in quarantine in “the hole,” which is solitary confinement – a form of punishment widely regarded as psychological torture.
Sharon Daniel walks through her online interactive documentary, “EXPOSED: Documenting COVID-19 in the Criminal Punishment System,” discussing the injustices of mass incarceration during the pandemic.
“The pandemic that prisoners face is larger than COVID-19,” Daniels said. “The virus simply compounds the ills of the continuum of slavery, incarceration, and systemic racism that began when English settlers landed upon the shores of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619.”
“EXPOSED” is a cumulative public record history of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on incarcerated people across the U.S from the perspective of prisoners and families that can be found online.
Viewers can interact and view the interviews, audio clips, and statistics collected from a comprehensive array of publications online that were assembled by Daniels into an interactive timeline dating from October 30, 2020 to December 30, 2021.
“Each day, EXPOSED offered abundant testimony to the risk and trauma that prisoners experience under corona-virus quarantine,” Daniels explained.
Before the pandemic and her efforts in curating “EXPOSED,” Daniels had a long history with working with the criminal justice system. She first visited the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, California 17 years ago.
“It changed my life,” Daniels said. “The stories I heard when I first went inside changed my most basic perceptions of justice, of freedom, and of responsibility.”
“I returned again and again to the CCWF to see how I could provide testimonies for the injustices incarcerated women were facing, with my artwork,” Daniels said.
Since that time, Daniels has created interactive artworks that focus primarily on mass incarceration and the criminal legal system – positing that the entire prison system is a large pandemic that needs to be exposed and solved.
“We need to look beyond prisons as a means to solve societal problems,” Daniels said. “We need to look toward a future in which vital needs are met and everyone can live safe and fulfilled lives.”
Jane Nguyen is a fourth-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Communication major and minoring in Applied Psychology. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.