On May 4, 2013, as part of the New Museum's IDEAS CITY StreetFest, we launched Ask A Prisoner, a collaborative project with the Civic-Duty Initiative that enables members of mainstream society to converse with a group of socially engaged incarcerated individuals.  In furtherance of IDEAS CITY's theme, "untapped capital," we encouraged visitors to consider prisoners as potential partners in our efforts to remedy our City's greatest social problems.  

 

We facilitated this conversation by providing personal information and photographs of each of the incarcerated collaborators of the project and inviting the mainstream public to submit questions to them.  The questions that we gathered addressed diverse issues such as health, prison, redemption, social justice, art, fitness among others.  Please scroll above to read what visitors submitted.

Since Civic Duty Initiative members are prisoners in New York State correctional facilities, they do not have access to the internet and limited access to phones.  Questions gathered during IDEAS CITY were mailed to members of the Civic-Duty Initiative and we have received answers to most of the questions already.  

 

Visit the project's tumblr page to read and hear answers for the questions submitted.