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Stills from artist Fiona Tan’s 2004 “Correction,” on exhibit at the Hammer Muse

Former judge Sol Wachtler boasts an impressive resume. As chief justice of the highest court of New York state – the Court of Appeals – he stood as one of the state’s greatest jurists who upheld the freedom of the press and strongly advocated women’s and minority rights.

Yet when Sharon Dolovich, a UCLA professor of law, considered extending him an invitation to serve on a panel discussing the U.S. prison system, she was as much drawn to his exemplary judicial record as she was to another, more sordid part of his personal record – the 11-month term he spent as a convict behind the bars of a federal prison and mental health unit.

“(Wachtler) has had both the experiences of being a lawmaker in one of the nation’s most important courts and of being a prisoner,” Dolovich said. “He was one of the nation’s leading lights, and was treated with not just incredible respect, but with deference wherever he went as a judge. So to go from that experience to being dehumanized as a prisoner is quite uncommon and remarkable.”

But even more unusual than Wachtler’s own history is the event that will bring Dolovich and Wachtler together – a Sept. 22 panel discussing the work of artist Fiona Tan, currently on display at the Hammer Museum through Oct. 16.

In her exhibit, “Correction,” Tan delves into the world of the U.S. prison system, displaying approximately 300 video portraits of prison inmates and guards.

Each anonymous inmate or guard stares directly into the camera for 40 seconds while standing as still as possible. Then, their images disappear from one of six hanging screens, and new individuals appear.

Tan first decided to pursue the project after reading a newspaper article listing the staggering numbers (over 2.2 million) of incarcerated men and women in the U.S. After about nine months of researching and obtaining permission from four prisons – two men’s and two women’s, in the states of California and Illinois – Tan completed her project.

“I was interested in the juxtapositions of those who have power and those who are incarcerated – locked away, and those who guard over them – contrasting prisoners with guards,” said Tan. “The interesting thing that I found, though, is that sometimes you can very clearly see, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a guard. He’s got these big muscles, big arms and he has a very strong powerful pose,’ but quite often you only can tell guards are guards because of the uniforms they’re wearing.”

Tan spoke with each of the inmates before filming them, to obtain their permission. But her interactions with the inmates deeply affected her own views of prisons and made her hypothesize about how she would act were she a prisoner herself.

“I hadn’t actually been inside a prison before or been exposed to that whole area. Spending days and days inside prisons and meeting prisoners and guards and being myself, for that day, locked away, made me realize that a lot of it is bad luck,” Tan said.

“There are people from difficult circumstances, in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s not like I’m saying they’re all good guys. There are criminals among them. But some of those people, they look just like your sister or next-door neighbor.”

Because of her experience with criminal law and prison law and policy, Dolovich was contacted by the UCLA Hammer Museum to speak about the exhibit from a legal perspective. She appreciates Tan’s approach toward humanizing a group of people that tends to be vastly ignored or, at worst, reviled by society.

“Prison inmates in our nation’s prisons and jails are really treated as less than human,” Dolovich said.

“They’re not accorded the amount of respect that you would accord your next door neighbor or the person that you would walk by on the street. They’re locked in very small cells. They’re kept in very high-pressure, dangerous, trauma-inducing circumstances. And their keepers are people who look at them at best with indifference and at worst with hostility and contempt. To put it mildly, it’s a dehumanizing experience.”

Wachtler, on the other hand, sees the exhibit as a valuable opportunity for self-expression among inmates.

“By and large, the people in the prison population do not have the ability to express themselves clearly. Many of them are uneducated, many of them have spent their life in corrections, and so they can’t really tell in an articulate way what besets them, what bothers them, what drives them – the emotions of a person who has been caged, sometimes for many years,” he said.

“The beauty of the Tan exhibit is that this gives them another method of expression. But the person who sees it has to be sensitive enough to read the despair, read the hopelessness, and sometimes, of the humiliation that follows prison.”

Wachtler himself experienced much of this same despair, hopelessness and humiliation throughout serving his own sentence.

Although the recollection of his experiences to an audience, as he plans to do for the “Correction” panel, can be painful, he sees his participation as absolutely necessary in order to pursue his goal of achieving prison and rehabilitation reform.

“There’s about as much sympathy for former prisoners as there is for a python snake in a garden party. The theory is, ‘You did the crime, you do the time, you deserve your punishment,’” Wachtler said.

“But if you treat someone like garbage, then when that person gets out of prison, he’s going to act like garbage. I’m not saying that prisons should be luxurious – not at all – and prisons should be a form of punishment, no question about it, but there should also be some rehabilitation of prisoners in such a way that they would come out and not be a menace to society – not for the prisoner’s sake, but for society’s sake.”

Dolovich points out that though there are approximately 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S., beyond the success of these numbers, little praise remains due to the prison system.

Facilities with rehabilitation, drug treatment and GED equivalency programs are few and far between. And worse yet is the fact that the system will not likely change any time soon, despite the efforts of activists like Wachtler.

Now that he has been out of federal prison for about 13 years, Wachtler has written a book, taught law students, and lectured across the country. Ironically, although his prison expertise has increased exponentially, his scope of influence has substantially diminished.

“Unfortunately, someone who has been in the prisons is the person least able to bring about reform, because others always say, ‘Yeah, who cares about what he has to say?’” Wachtler said.

“So now that I’m able to make a greater contribution than ever, people don’t want to hear it. When I was in a position really to bring influence and to bring about reforms as the chief judge of New York state, I wasn’t interested either.”

Tan’s exhibit finally begins to give those prisoners a compelling voice.

“Art is about helping people see life in new ways, and she’s used the perspective of the artist to make dehumanized people human,” Dolovich said. “That’s a remarkable accomplishment.”