All over the world jails and prisons are notorious for cruelty and the abuse of human rights. As Dholakia (2023) explains, prisons are often overcrowded, understaffed, dangerous, dehumanizing and traumatizing places where violence is routinely ‘unavoidable’. The Vera Institute argues that the impact of incarceration far outlasts whatever time people spend behind bars and promotes more prison programs such as the creative arts to foster healing and accountability. Can incarcerated artists heal themselves in order to heal the world? The Center for Art and Advocacy promotes, their mission is to fund ‘art to change the story and the system’. There are many more enterprises creating documentaries for example, in order to do the same thing.

So can the art of system impacted people really transform the justice system? Changing the system means both helping those transcend intersectionality, as well as changing the hearts and minds of the free community to believe in rehabilitation and second chances. Supposedly, writing and painting works to do these things from the inside out too – incarcerated artists are learning through doing, and those who value carceral art, are advocating for systemic change through consuming these creative works. Applying marketing concepts may help to better understand the creative effectiveness of changing the system through the production and selling of carceral art. For example, if we consider who buys carceral art, we may see what informs their beliefs and attitudes when purchasing, appreciating, and advocating for ‘changing the story’. According to Barney Davey, at its basic level, art marketing is a systematized process of creating awareness and interest for an artist or artwork that leads to a desire to engage the artist, gallery, or company to own its products, use its services, or all the above. While prisons do not market the art per se, the creative works are a residual product of their existence.

In 2022 The Art of Incarceration aired on Netflix for the first time, engaging the world with First Nations artists from Victoria’s Fulham Correctional Centre. Uncle Jack Charles says there has been 40 years of advocacy in Victoria that now sees carceral art sold through the social enterprise, The Torch. The film has generated word of mouth and potentially influenced consumer decision making through the promotion of its online art exhibition, ‘Confined 14’ – a theme implicitly concerned with future needs of artists and consumers to create change. According to The Torch’s website, there have been 230/470 of these artworks sold to date. This is a good achievement, and perhaps not surprising, given the exhibition ran concurrently with the promotion of the Uluru Statement of the Heart that specifically mentions that First Nations people are not an innately criminal people, lobbying a voice to parliament would address the over representation of First Nations people in prison.

When marketing carceral art to influence consumer attitudes, the social judgement theory can be used here to consider how a product incorporates a lot of the communication that happens within the political sphere. For example, we accept messages within our latitude of acceptance. Conversion, however, only occurs through strong and consistent messaging, rather than through a single effort. The Uluru Statement itself, hangs on the wall of the Northern Territory library, yet it was not enough to ensure Territorians would more proportionally vote ‘yes’. Marketing however, uses the theory of congruity as a formula to predict attitude changes with respect to source and concept. For example, if an audience considers a source reliable, interesting, and attractive there is congruity so there is no push to attitudinal change.

The artwork for sale in The Torch’s gallery is of sound product availability, and is aesthetically attractive, culturally interesting, and reliable with its inclusion of artists’ stories on the webpage. Its overwhelming positive feel may inadvertently, however, suggest that a prison system with an arts program is enough, and that radical justice reform is not essential. Radical organisational change depends on cultural innovation which is more difficult to achieve than cultural maintenance. For example, Blythe argues that the consumer decision making process (based on Dewey’s model) must include the consumer first feeling some type of difficulty, so that consequences are considered and a solution is accepted.

Arguably, the answer to more effective carceral art changing the system may be achieved through a combination of conversion (consistent messaging) and Dewey’s trusted 1910 model of consumer decision making processes based on consumers’ feelings of difficulty. If consumer beliefs can be formed explicitly through learning and exposure to stimuli, then it can potentially drive the decision to purchase carceral art for a political purpose. For example, the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer sparked a wave of mural art all over the world, spurring the Black Lives Matter movement. The interplay between external and internal stimuli can fuel the carceral arts market in Australia too, when how we feel cannot help but influence our choices.  

The Torch’s online gallery is aesthetically appealing and showcases activist art, but it does not directly influence how one feels about Australia’s Black history as a penal colony. Economist, George Loewenstein considers choice under uncertainty to be an issue of how people feel, rather than think, when decision-making. The Legacy Museum in Alabama for instance, creates an experience for people to walk through the emotive history of Black slavery to the subsequent waves of incarcerated Black people in the United States. Furthermore, the legacy museum implements the marketing tool of ‘exiting through the gift shop’ where carceral arts and merchandise are sold every day the museum is open. Pointing to Zajnoc’s (2001) marketing theory that more exposure creates more internal beliefs in response to a product.

Essentially it is governments, judges, and correctional staff who have the power to change prisons from being places of cruelty, violence, and trauma; to protecting people in custody (Stroud, 2023).  We don’t know if judges, government officials, or correctional staff buy carceral art, but we do know that people from everyday life are free to enter state and federally funded museums and art galleries. What governments in Australia need to consider is the purpose for a legacy museum in this country, where people from all walks of life are free to experience the causes of mass incarceration and its various representations in carceral art. Then, the only revolving door would be to the gift shop.