Welcome to Hell

Wednesday March 23rd, 2011

Early that morning, Justin Clemons got a call. The number was strange. He didn’t answer. When he got around to his voicemail, he heard a woman with an English accent. Her name was Kelly Preedy, photo editor of Marie Claire UK. She said Marie Claire had an exclusive story about the last interviews of two prisoners on Death Row. She liked Justin’s portraits; was he interested?

Justin jumped out of bed and quickly got to his email. This is a story I would love to tell, he thought. He tried to call back the number listed in the email, but he couldn’t get through. The country code was wrong. As valuable time went by—time which could be used to hire another photographer—Justin frantically googled the phrase “how do you call London from Texas.”

He finally got through. Kelly still wanted Justin for the job, and sent him some information about taking photos on Death Row. The two men would be behind glass in tiny booths, in an ominous-looking interview room. They would talk through telephones, with no access to the rest of the prison. The writer of the story, Joanna Walters, wrote to him to explain who he’d be shooting. Michael Perry was convicted of killing three people while stealing two cars. His DNA was found at the scene, but he insisted he was not involved in the killing. Derrick Jackson had been in jail for more than 20 years and on Death Row for more than 10. He was convicted of killing two male opera singers during a burglary. He spent his time on Death Row writing online protests with titles like “Welcome to Hell.”

Justin and his assistant Matt got together in Dallas and headed down to Livingston, Texas. They checked into the hotel, and headed over to the prison. The portrait shoot wasn’t until the next day, but they had a shot list: razor wire, sign, lookout tower… They were asked to leave.

When they returned to the hotel the two tried to set up a plan. Marie Claire was only allotted 30 minutes with each prisoner, including the writer’s interview. Including setting up. They carefully planned out the lighting and all of their tasks, when they got a call from Joanna. There’s been an error, she said; Matt does not have clearance and will not be allowed on the premises. Damn, thought Justin. How am I going to pull this off by myself, in the amount of time I have? He would have to search the environment, walk long hallways carrying all his equipment himself, set up his lights, work out problems with glass reflections and extremely tight spaces. To top it off, the writer could only leave him eight minutes of shooting time. Before he went to bed, Justin prayed.

He woke up, and it was time to get to the prison. Justin made it through the checkpoints. The inmates were already there when he started setting up and testing lights. They sat in small boxes with a window, a stool, and a phone. When he got everything set up, Justin was told that he and the inmate would have to move to another location. Are you serious? he thought. But he moved, and started shooting while the writer interviewed the first inmate. He liked the way it looked, but time was running out. He tapped Joanna on the shoulder. “We have eight minutes left,” Justin said, “and I’ve got to get some shots of just the inmate.” She wrapped up in a couple minutes and handed the phone to Justin.

The inmate’s name was Michael. He had been accused of shooting a 50 year old woman, her grandson, and his friend, and dumping them in the woods. Justin told him to sit there and relax. He was surprised to learn that Michael was very polite. He hung up the phone, walked back about 15 feet, and started shooting. Before long a good 15 minutes had passed, but no one had told him to stop. Justin just kept shooting.

A few stalls down, Justin learned, was a film crew from the Discovery Channel. They got the time extended with the inmates, so they had an extra 30 minutes, more or less. Justin picked up the phone again. He asked Michael to stand up and lean against the wall, but Michael just started talking, asking questions one after the other. You can tell he hasn’t had much human interaction, Justin thought. He just wants me to talk.

Justin already had the shot. So he sat and talked. Michael was a gracious conversationalist. Was this the guy who had killed three people? They talked about cameras, food, and their dads. Michael’s dad had just died three weeks before, and Justin had lost his dad a few months ago. They talked about the influence their dads had on their lives, about how all they wanted was to have their dad’s approval. Was this the guy who had killed three people? It was as though they were just sitting in a pub, having a beer.

Justin ended the conversation, and took shots for a few more minutes. The next inmate came over. Same deal. Then it was done. He got permission to walk around outside to get some exterior shots. Then he took a portrait of Joanna, the writer, and they left. When he got back to the hotel, he found Matt lying in the bed watching the World Cup. Matt was bummed he couldn’t come.

Two weeks later Michael Perry was dead. His last words: “I’m coming home, Dad, I’m coming home.” People ask Justin what it was like to be face-to-face with such criminals. But Justin had been so focused on the lights, on the shots, on the clock, that he didn’t think about it. “I really had no emotion while I was there,” he tells them. “It wasn’t until that night, and later hearing that they were both executed that I felt the gravity of the situation.”

It’s hard to think of a more complicated subject than the death penalty. It would be ethically questionable if sympathy for the executed covered up horror at their crimes. But for Justin, this experience only made him realize that the distance between Death Row inmates and “ordinary” people isn’t as great as it seems. ”You could absolutely never pick them out in a crowd,” he says. He can imagine other people—young men like the prisoners he met, who make bad decisions and get themselves into trouble—reacting the wrong way in a dangerous situation, and signing their own death warrants. But the individuals aren’t the main issue. The system is. Justin learned that there’s a huge cost to the death penalty. According to the Dallas Morning News, a death penalty case in Texas costs an average of $2.3 million, about three times as much as 40 years of high-security imprisonment. ”We can do so much good with that amount of money,” Justin tells me. “So much better than just ending someone’s life.”

Not everyone will agree. But this is Justin’s story.

-Asad