Giving Compass' Take:

• The Conversation profiles Haitian-American artist Moliere Dimanche, a formerly incarcerated person who documented the abuses he witnessed in the Florida penal system through pencil sketches.

• What can policymakers, advocates and average citizens do to address the neglect and maltreatment that prisoners like Dimanche endured? Pictures are worth a thousand words.

• Here's how philanthropy can support criminal justice reform.

In 2007, Haitian-American artist Moliere Dimanche was sentenced to 10 years in Florida state prisons, where he ended up serving eight-and-a-half years.

While imprisoned, he made art — a series of pencil drawings on the back of stray sheets of paper — to document the brutality of his time spent behind bars, much of it in isolation.

In 2017, I was introduced to Dimanche, one of the dozens of currently and formerly incarcerated people I have interviewed over the past several years for my forthcoming book on visual art in the era of mass incarceration.

Often using state-issued material or contraband, imprisoned artists use a myriad of genres and styles to create political collages, portraits of other imprisoned people and mixed-media works that comment on abuse, racism and the exploitation of prison labor.

In Dimanche’s story, I see the stories of thousands of others in U.S. prisons who are using art and creativity to shine a light on their experiences and advocate for systemic change.

Read the full article about the former prisoner using art to shed light on atrocities of incarceration by Nicole R. Fleetwood at The Conversation.