Guys in jail can be pretty crafty, pretty creative. Get someone who's done real time talking, and, sooner or later, you'll hear stories about makeshift water heaters or MacGyvered-up toasters.
A couple of years ago, I was sent a book by "Angelo," a guy in jail who wrote a book detailing all the jury-rigged contraptions he found behind bars. Here's some of what I wrote about Prisoners Inventions in Wired News:
[The book] shows how inmates fashion dice from sugar water and toilet paper, dry bologna jerky on jail-house light fixtures, [and] turn hot sauce bottles into shower heads...
"This gives a glimpse into the everyday lives of the outrageous number of people we have in our prison system," said [Chicago-based art group] Temporary Services' Marc Fischer, who first started trading letters with Angelo in 1991. "And it's a celebration of the creativity that comes in response to their restrictive environment."
In the movies, "prisoners only create things to escape, get high or kill each other," Fischer notes.
Angelo's objects show a more banal, more human side of locked-down life: one where soda cans filled with rocks become crude alarm clocks and inmates cool their drinks in toilet bowls.
For a while, now, Temporary Services has been building the tools based on Angelo's diagrams, and showing 'em off in art galleries.This month, they're back in Chicago, at the I-Space.
Then, in the Spring, the Prisoners' Inventions head to San Francisco's Yerba Buena Arts Center. The show has 13 new drawings from Angelo.
Two of 'em I've linked here: one for a chess set made of soap (above, right), the other (left) for a little jury-rigged, jailhouse companion.
