Inmates at the Suffolk County jail serving time for drug convictions turned to a photography program championed by the sheriff as part of their recovery — and their work is now being displayed as art.
The exhibit, installed in the visiting lobby at the Yaphank Correctional Facility through September, features photographs by 20 nonviolent offenders participating in Suffolk County Sheriff Errol Toulon Jr.’s Addiction Treatment Program.
“This program has changed my whole life,” said Skyler Davis, who was released from jail in late August after completing his sentence on drug possession charges.
Over five weeks, photographer Saskia Keeley worked with the participants, teaching portrait photography and helping them create collages that reflected their past, their present circumstances and the futures they hoped to build, she said.
Keeley, who has led similar photography programs in jails and prisons across the country, said the goal is to give incarcerated people a sense of agency as they work to move beyond their criminal histories.
For Sean Hughes Jackson, another inmate in the program, incarceration brought a painful realization: the life he had been living was far from “normal.”
“I was doing drugs with my mother — and I thought that was normal,” Jackson said.
Toulon, a Democrat, said the Suffolk County addiction treatment initiative has helped reshape participants’ perspectives over the past four years.
“Incarceration is [not] a substitute for rehabilitation or treatment, but while someone is in our custody, we have a responsibility to give them every possible tool to make a different choice when they leave here,” Toulon said.
