$125 Million From Mellon Will Go to Artists Working to Change Public Attitudes on Criminal Justice

As the Mellon Foundation seeks to shift public opinion on America’s prison policy, it is taking an unconventional approach: It is betting $125 million on creative artists — especially those who have spent time behind bars — to figure out ways to spark new conversations that lead to policy change.

For instance, it has awarded $1 million to the nonprofit Right of Return to expand the number of formerly incarcerated poets, designers, and artists it supports.

For Jesse Krimes, Right of Return’s co-founder, the grant represents a tidal change in the way philanthropy addresses criminal-justice issues since he was released from prison nearly a decade ago. Since then, Krimes sees a new openness among grant makers to support, and learn from, people who have been released from prison. He sees particular value in turning to creative people to bring about transformative changes.

“Artists are very good at humanizing very complex, fraught issues,” says Krimes. “They’re able to connect with people and not only educate them on a certain issue but also help them see it from a very different perspective.”

Mellon’s new grant-making effort, called Imagining Freedom, will support arts and humanities projects that bring to life the experiences of people who have been incarcerated as well as their friends and relatives. In doing so, it will share the views of a big part of the U.S. population. At least half of Americans have a relative who has been in prison, the foundation notes, and some 77 million people have been arrested, prosecuted, or convicted of a crime.

Mellon has been working for several years to fund creative programs in prisons and groups like Right to Return, but it was not until Wednesday that it unveiled its goal of spending at least $125 million in five years.

In announcing the commitment Wednesday, it also named its latest round of grantees, including the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative’s Flashlights project, which aims to create a public digital archive on the experiences of incarcerated women, and the Formerly Incarcerated College Graduates Network, a professional association.

Reimagining Incarceration

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, announced that the fund would do more to focus on criminal justice.

But that formal commitment, she says, was built on decades of work. She credits the emergence of Black studies and other social movements in the late 1960s with first galvanizing artists and scholars to talk about mass incarceration and policing. Now, she says, as more Americans are aware of the police murders of Black men like George Floyd and Tyre Nichols, Alexander believes this the right moment to invest in art and humanities projects that can advance new ways of thinking about public safety.

“Arts, culture, and critical thinking are the antidotes” to the trauma and disruption that mass incarceration inflicts on communities, says Alexander.

“This system, and its disproportionate race and class-based harm, affects all of us. It affects our thriving; it affects our collective humanity,” she says.

Supporting Incarcerated Artists

For Right of Return, the Mellon Foundation’s new focus on incarceration couldn’t come soon enough. The group used to rely primarily on grants from Open Philanthropy, a grant maker largely supported by donors Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, to sustain most of its yearly fellowship grants, which award $20,000 each to formerly incarcerated people whose creative work explores themes that advance criminal and racial justice.

Within a year after the Covid outbreak, Open Philanthropy began redirecting its resources to other projects that it thought needed immediate resources.

Right of Return then looked to the Mellon Foundation to fill the gap. Not only will the foundation’s grant this year allow the group to sustain its fellowship program but it will also allow Right of Return to expand its activities to include training and mentoring opportunities for new artists.

“A lot of our artists who have been incarcerated have lost decades of their life in learning opportunities and community networks,” says Krimes, who noted that the group’s fellowships have helped some artists achieve extraordinary success.

The multimedia artist Mary Baxter, one of Right of Return’s inaugural fellows, was homeless when she first received a grant. Her work, which depicts the challenges women and mothers of color face in the criminal legal system, has since been displayed at the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia.

By continuing to support the work of formerly incarcerated artists like Baxter, Krimes believes that it will be possible to continue improving the public’s understanding of prisons and the legal system and the possibilities beyond incarceration.

“These systems are designed to tear away people’s everything — their hopes and dreams,” says Krimes. “Yet people find ways, through creativity, to hold on to their dignity.”