James Hough is currently in year 26 of a life sentence in Phoenix, Pennsylvania. If he wants to buy a six-pack of underwear from his commissary, he will need $3.09. And while that might not seem like much to the average person, Hough, as a 44-year-old prison laborer gets paid less than 35 cents an hour to make the very shorts he then has to purchase. Hough depicted this in his piece How Big House Products Makes Boxer Shorts.

Paul Cortez is currently in year 12 of a sentence of 25 years to life in New York. In order to make calls to his family and friends, he depends on the financial generosity of those same family and friends to pay for the hefty costs of each call. In fact, “companies like Securus and Union Supply charge spouses $3.95 to listen to a voicemail from their partners”. Paul, 38, painted a three-panel piece called Prison Profit-Tears in which he depicts the financial exploitation of predominantly black and brown prisoners and the family members who commit their funds just to maintain a lifeline with their incarcerated family members.

Usually, the voices of the incarcerated who are directly impacted by these fees are hidden from public view, even though we routinely use the furniture, lingerie and blue jeans they produce. But in a new exhibition, the work of both men, and many more, will be shared in the hope that it could advocate for vital change.

James Yaya Hough - How Big House Products Makes Boxer Shorts. Photograph: James Yaya Hough

On 11 October, the Corrections Accountability Project debuted the opening of an exhibit titled Capitalizing on Justice at the Urban Justice Center’s exhibition space in Manhattan. Bianca Tylek, director and founder of the project, started the organization in June 2017 to “challenge the industry that has been developed around mass incarceration and mass surveillance” and “to end the commercialization of criminal justice and the exploitation of the people in a system that is failing them”.

For the exhibition to work, Tylek required the help of her newest staff member Lawrence Bartley, who has spent 27 years at Sing Sing correctional facility. While Bartley was still serving time, Tylek had begun working with him on a variety of projects. Once she convinced the Urban Justice Center to open up their space for the eventual exhibit, she turned to Bartley, asking him to identify interest in art from fellow incarcerates. He immediately sprung into action utilizing his time at Sing Sing to “recruit from art classes at the prison”. They worked tirelessly together on every element of the program with Bartley publicizing internally at the prison and Tylek fundraising and advertising externally. The efforts led Tylek to the formation of an eclectic and skilled curatorial committee including famed artist Che Morales and cultural theorist Nicole Fleetwood.

The final image of a triptych titled Prison Profit-Tears by Paul V Cortez. Photograph: Paul V Cortez

Reaching beyond those incarcerated in New York was a critical part in making the exhibit happen but required ingenuity on the part of Bartley. As Tylek put it: “Lawrence started pulling the most popular names in America” and started to “plug in the most popular names state by state to look up names of prisoners”. It’s nearly impossible to send a letter to a prisoner without the prisoner’s ID number which can be found under their names on state search tools for prisoners. Essentially, “Lawrence was pretty much cold-emailing people”. But it worked. Prisoners received “heartfelt” letters from him about “knowing what it’s like being in their position” and asking them to distribute flyers and spread word soliciting art submissions for the exhibit.

“We got pieces from everywhere,” emphasized Tylek, ranging from all sorts of prisons, even the “most maximum security prison” in the country, the ADX Florence, in Fremont county, Colorado.

“I seldom have to convince people that this matters or that it’s a problem – I just have to tell them it’s happening,” she tells me. For Tylek, it’s a matter of building awareness. In her words: “[People] don’t know that people have to pay for phone calls out of prison, or that prison labor, sometimes free or 30 cents per hour, that the same items they make are sold back to them in commissary.”

Hough and Cortez, in Tylek’s words, are now “agents of change” and they, along with many others, are “illustrating the ways in which mass incarceration and mass surveillance have been commercialized”. Tylek doesn’t have to convince attendees of the problem, the pieces will do so on their own – informing every observer of the devastating nature of prison’s capitalism.