Alexandra Gallant-Lee’s This Place is a Prison, These People Aren’t Your Friends is a zine-style exploration of a subject that is unafraid to ask difficult questions. Using her background in criminology Gallant-Lee looks to examine the problematic nature of carceral spaces like prisons, jails and plantations, and how we interact with them on an ethical basis. It’s a combination, then, of the psychogeographical and the socially relevant, from the creator who most recently gave us the excellent Brains, a damning comics indictment of the rise of AI.
Gallent-Lee’s subjects in these pages include a former police headquarters, a former city jail and a former federal prison. What is being studied here is the way in which when such institutions are shut down they often become commercialised and evolve into tourist attractions, despite their humanity-denying pasts. At the heart of This Place is a Prison, These People Aren’t Your Friends is the idea of how we should work to preserve these environments in a way that recognises their pasts without trivialising them.
One of Gallant-Lee’s great strengths as a communicator is the way in which she needs little space to actually convince us of the inappropriateness of this kind of practice in a direct fashion. Instead, she simply lays out the insensitivity of jail-themed hotels and restaurants with similarly themed menus and décor, allowing the reader to be immediately repelled by the inherent absurdity and moral disregard.
Her final subject is the infamous Alcatraz prison and how it has, conversely, been preserved to reflect the dehumanising nature of the building in its original form and the experiences of those who lived there. Throughout she uses a mix of vibrant illustration and inserted alternative media (photographic mugshots of famous white inmates for example) to create an almost collage-like effect. One that brings the echoes of the past resoundingly into the present.
Given its format this isn’t, obviously, intended as a comprehensive dissection of all the issues involved. But what This Place is a Prison, These People Aren’t Your Friends does, and does so well, is to act as a springboard for further thought and consideration. For similar work that explores social reform issues in comics and zines check out our Broken Frontier resource lists here.
Alexandra Gallant-Lee (W/A) • Self-published, $8.00
Buy in print from Radiator Comics here
Buy online in digital form here (name your own price)
Review by Andy Oliver
