‘CAPTURED’: Book Features “People In Prison Drawing People Who Should Be”

At the outset of the process that led to the creation of CAPTURED, a new coffee table book from artists Jeff Greenspan and Andrew Tider featuring the art of inmates, the duo focused in on a hypocrisy that runs underneath the entirety of the American criminal justice system: power — especially political power — is reason enough for special treatment.

Take Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat, for example, who oversaw a company that engaged in currency manipulation on a global scale and lied about the condition of toxic mortgages to investors, a crucial puzzle piece in the Great Recession of 2007-2009. He is a free man today, though his company has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.

Or Ellen Kullman, former DuPont CEO, whose products have poisoned scores of people around the world. In 2014, Forbes ranked her the 31st most powerful woman in the world.

Or Rex Tillerson of Exxon Mobile who… well, where to start? Illegal extraction of oil, overcharging service station owners, covering up research that raised flags on global warming decades ago — Exxon’s done it all. But Rex was also national president of Boy Scouts of America from 2010 through 2012. So he’s got that going for him, which is nice.

CAPTURED sums up the paradox of America’s justice system with a simple concept: inmates’ depictions of should-be-inmates.

Proceeds from the book’s sale will go towards Bernie Sanders’s presidential bid, according its website, but copies of the limited edition volume are moving fast. So we’ve received permission to reprint the following images. Let’s call them Portraits of The CEOs as Con Men: