At the end of the audio tour at Eastern State Penitentiary, a 16-foot steel sculpture called “The Big Graph” offers a visual representation of mass incarceration in America. It illustrates the racial breakdown of prison populations since 1970 and charts other nations’ rates of incarceration compared to the United States. (The U.S. sits far above the rest.) The exhibit, called “Prisons Today: Questions in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” was added in 2016 in an effort to contextualize the impact of Eastern State Penitentiary and U.S. prisons.

Hope Corrigan

To read more: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/06/09/rethinking-prison-tourism

The Empathetic Museum. [@empatheticmuseum] (July 3, 2022). “At the end of the audio tour at Eastern State Penitentiary, a 16-foot steel sculpture called “The Big Graph” offers a visual representation of mass incarceration in America.” [Photography: Aaron Ricketts for the Marshall Project]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/empatheticmuseum/p/CfkNDrhP2ih/