Growing up here: Sahiah in 2019 at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility library. At age 16, she was sentenced to 20 years to life. “There is light at the end of my tunnel,” she wrote.(Sara Bennett)
Sara Bennett, a former public defender, spent more than a decade photographing women sentenced to life, mostly for homicide, in New York State’s prisons. A new book of her photographs, Looking Inside: Women With Life Sentences, traces their lives behind prison walls and, for those who have been released after decades behind bars, their reentry into the outside world. Most of the women in the book were released through parole. Others had their sentences reduced through New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, which allows people to petition the courts for resentencing if the crime they were convicted of was linked to abuse they had suffered. Meanwhile, in New York’s three women’s prisons, 174 people are serving life sentences. As of 2024, one in 11 incarcerated women, or more than 6,800 nationally, were serving life sentences. Reprinted here are some of Bennett’s photos of those women from Looking Inside.
—Victoria Law
Almost there: Valerie in 2019 at age 62, when she was on parole and living in supportive housing in the Bronx. She said that she felt free but “not free.”(Sara Bennett)A room of her own: Karen in 2017 at age 69, at a shelter in Manhattan after serving 35 years. “I feel safe and secure,” she wrote. “The room I’m living in is spare. But it’s mine.”(Sara Bennett)Finding light: Carol in 2014 at age 66, with her grandson Cecil and his friend. She served 35 years before being released in 2013.(Sara Bennett)Reunited: Veronica in 2021 at age 53, with her husband of 29 years, Vernon, in their apartment. She was released in 2019 after serving 27 years.(Sara Bennett)Serving time: Linda in 2019 at age 70, in the recreation room for the medically unemployed at the Taconic Correctional Facility in Bedford Hills. She began serving a 30-year sentence in 1992, when she was 43. (Sara Bennett)Have faith: Andrea, pictured in 2019 at age 64, was incarcerated in 2001 at age 46 and released in 2020. She dealt with prison by, among other things, going to church.(Sara Bennett)
Looking Inside was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2026. Bennett’s photos will be on display in 2027 at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York in Manhattan.
Investigators are rapidly closing out claims of workplace discrimination so that they can search for the kinds of cases chair Andrea Lucas most wants to find.
