The culture of criminal punishment is a point of departure that the multifaceted Chicago-based artist Marc Fischer has returned to repeatedly over his career. Marc began corresponding with incarcerated people while distributing his photocopied fanzines in high school. While attending Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh as an undergraduate, he curated an exhibition with the work of several artists incarcerated at the now-shuttered Western State Penitentiary. Through corresponding with incarcerated people, Marc met and developed a long-term collaboration with Angelo, a prolific artist incarcerated in California. Angelo's drawings and descriptions of incarcerated people's improvised implements were assembled into a 2003 book titled Prisoners’ Inventions by the artist collective Temporary Services, through which Marc collaborates alongside Brett Bloom and Salem Collo-Julin. A contemporaneous traveling exhibition by the same name included examples of the inventions Angelo sketched and described in the book. Since that time, Marc has occasionally collaborated with projects addressing incarceration, as with Captive Audience, a group show he put together in 2007 at Chicago's Gallery 400, consisting of work addressing imprisonment and surveillance by incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and non-incarcerated artists. Another example is his collaboration with the collective Lucky Pierre; in 2012, Marc published their set of performance scores, 100 Actions for Chicago Torture Justice, which responded to the city's infamous legacy of violent interrogations by police officials like Jon Burge and Richard Zuley. On his own and with Temporary Services, other important collaborations around the politics of incarceration have included Peggy Diggs, Anthony Rayson, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.In the last several years, with the rising tide of protests against police violence in Chicago and elsewhere, Marc has created and contributed to a number of projects that present aspects of the city's criminal punishment apparatus. He has created and handed out hundreds of two-color posters addressing specific police murders, as well as stickers stating: “We'd feel safer without police.” Through attending the trial of Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago police officer eventually convicted of murdering unarmed Black 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, Marc initiated a project entitled Courtroom Artist Residency, in which he invited others to attend and observe trials with him at the Cook County Criminal Court, located near the county jail in the neighborhood of Little Village; this might be seen as a free-form intervention based on the work of “courtwatch” groups. After leaving court, Marc and the resident would have a meal at the nearby Taqueria El Milagro and discuss their experiences. Through his imprint, Half Letter Press, and under his moniker, Public Collectors, he published documentation of these court visits with the title Courtroom Artist Residency Reports. The pandemic cut this project short in Spring 2020, but in the Fall, Marc created Police Scanner, a publication documenting 75 days in which he wrote down most of what he heard by tuning into the Chicago police scanner for around an hour, or until he filled a page or a suitable conclusion emerged; this could be seen as a low-stakes variation on the Black Panthers’ “copwatch” patrols. Lastly, Temporary Services put out a new edition of Prisoners’ Inventions in December 2020, published by Half Letter Press. More ideas around these themes are in the works.Through his collaborations and in the context of his larger body of work, as well as in his rapidly mass-produced multiples, the outlines of Marc's political and ethical commitments can be discerned. However, the quasi-ethnographic poetic approach he takes with his longer-term projects documenting the activities of police and judicial officials, as well as arrested and incarcerated people and their communities and advocates, remains centered on mundane strangeness, strong emotions, interpersonal exchanges, and occasional absurdities. During our interview, Marc made connections to the work of documentary director Frederick Wiseman, whose many films, including Titicut Follies, Hospital, and High School, are internationally renowned for highlighting details of lives lived in institutional settings. A part-time teacher as well as an artist, Marc reflected in our conversation on his development, affinities, and influences in relation to making work about spaces and agents of criminal punishment. Here, I amalgamate several edited excerpts in order to convey a sense of how Marc characterizes this vein of his practice.When I was in high school and college, I published a photocopied fanzine called Primary Concern that started in 1988 and ended in 1991. I made seven issues. No one gets to see them; it's my juvenilia. Periodically, someone would maybe see my zine in Maximum Rocknroll or in Factsheet Five, and I would get a letter from someone in prison. It cost about $2, but cash doesn't legally circulate in prison so they would send stamps, or they would ask for a free copy. At some point, I decided that it's absurd that a prisoner might have to work like 5 hours at their job to afford two dollars in stamps to be able to buy my publication, given what prison wages were, so I just made it free to people in prison. Then someone volunteered me for inclusion in this “free resources for prisoners” list. I would print maybe 200 copies of a zine and get maybe 300 requests per issue, just from people in prison. My parents got prisoners’ requests for zines for years after I stopped publishing it because the life of something like this piece of paper, this resource guide, in a prison library or moving between cells, is eternal. The optimism that you would still get something if you sent away for it years after the fact is extreme. That opened the floodgates of receiving mail from people in prison, and some of those letters were super interesting and really detailed, and they invited the possibility of correspondence.At one point, I was corresponding with quite a few people who were incarcerated. That happened in tandem with being in college in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University, and sometime during my junior year, a prisoner wrote to me from Western Penitentiary, which has since been destroyed, but was a maximum-security prison in Pittsburgh. I wrote him back and asked if there were a lot of prisoners making art there, and if there was some kind of an art program or activity program, and he confirmed that there was and told me who was responsible for managing it. Carnegie Mellon was very early to have a socially engaged art program, which they called “Artmaking in Context,” as in art in the context of the larger community. That was mostly built into their 3-year MFA grad program.I was an undergrad, and they had a condensed undergraduate version of this “Artmaking in Context” class where you would accomplish some kind of community project in a semester. It seemed like a good opportunity to try to do something with the prison because I felt that without the endorsement and support of the university, it would probably be totally impossible to gain entry to that place. My professor Joe Mannino encouraged me to pursue this idea. We both went to the prison together for an initial meeting. The guards made this dramatic show of searching us, like making us take off our belts and feeling along the length of the belt, to see if there could be any contraband inside our belts, turning our winter gloves inside out, and they tried to pry the face off my professor's watch. We met with the activities person, I had to sign all this paperwork stipulating that they were not responsible for my safety in a hostage situation. I had the option of not working with people with specific convictions if I wanted to not work with those people, and I just said I would meet with whoever is interested. They gave me a photo ID with my blood type on it, and I started having meetings with prisoner artists, and we would talk about their work. The prison had a small budget to buy art supplies, and I organized an exhibit of their work in the student gallery at Carnegie Mellon and coordinated with family members to include prisoners’ works that weren't easily transported out of the prison.Those were pretty intense experiences to have as a very naïve 20-year-old or 21-year-old. I was learning about Jean Dubuffet and his Art Brut museum, which I was able to visit around the same time, and I was looking at artwork created in institutional situations. I had a completely misguided and very romantic idea of what kind of art I would find being made at the prison. Instead of looking at things that looked like they were made by someone from another planet, I was looking at things that look like Bob Ross paintings, and I'd argue with prisoners about Bob Ross, and why I thought their version of a tree that they haven't seen in person because they'd been in prison for 25 years was far more interesting than a Bob Ross tree that's like his shorthand way of making a tree.That whole experience was extremely eye-opening. I don't know what opinions I thought I would have of prison guards before doing this work, but I was much more sympathetic to the prisoners that I worked with than the guards, who were far less pleasant to engage with. And it was also an amazing kind of cross-cultural multi-generational experience because I was so much younger than most of the people I was meeting with. A lot of them were twice my age. Some people were serving double life sentences or had been in prison as long as I had been alive. It was very validating for them to get feedback on their work from someone who also thought of himself as an artist and was studying art at that university. It all felt very mutually respectful and supportive. I ended up volunteering at the prison for a year and a half—well beyond the class I was taking.At the same time, around 1990–1991, I started corresponding with Angelo, who Temporary Services then worked with about a decade later. Angelo's cellmate at the time was one of the people who wrote to me asking for a free copy of my zine, and then his cellmate shared the zine with Angelo, who wrote me a letter and sent me an example of one of his drawings, and then that touched off our friendship, which continued until he died in 2016. So that was all very formative.Another really big thing, in terms of thinking about the police and thinking about the criminal justice system or the court system, was simply moving to Chicago in 1993. I went to University of Chicago from 1993 to 1995, and just the experience of police there was so different from the places I'd lived before that point. I grew up in Philadelphia, but I grew up just outside of the city. Just outside of West Philadelphia. Philadelphia has a brutal history of police violence, but it wasn't in my face growing up. Pittsburgh, at least the part of Pittsburgh I lived in, did not have the kind of police presence that other parts of Pittsburgh have, but Chicago, compared to pretty much any other major city in the United States, has such an incredibly forceful police presence and such a deep history of extreme police violence. I wasn't participating in protests that much when I was an undergrad, but in Chicago, protest is a more forceful part of the experience of living in the city.I wasn't really old enough to be called for jury duty until after moving to Chicago. There were two times I went to Criminal Court as a possible juror and one time I went to civil court, which is really different. Those experiences opened the way for doing my Courtroom Artist Residency project, along with attending pre-trial hearings for Jason Van Dyke.1 It's because of the highly developed activism around police violence in Chicago that I would even find out that this was a thing you could do—that you could go to a pre-trial hearing for a police officer being charged with murder, and you are told which courtroom that you go to on this time on this date. And there would be people there, who, during recess, you could have a conversation with, who were more intimately familiar with how the court worked, and what was going on—things that were not obvious to me because I hadn't observed court in that way, at that point.The “We Would Feel Safer Without Police” poster I created and the flyers responding to the police murders of Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones were both very spontaneous reactions to particular events. I was attending a demonstration downtown in response to the murders of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, and I felt the need to make a sign. Because Temporary Services owns a Risograph (printer), if you're going to design one poster and print the result, you can just as easily print 50 of them. I was interested in not just displaying that message about feeling safer without police for myself, but encouraging others to own it collectively. It was interesting giving them to people. Some people just took them immediately, but there were other people who felt the need to be at this protest but weren't quite there yet, with an abolitionist position. That was about 5 years ago, and I feel like it would be much easier to give away those posters now than it was at the time. There's a much more public, mainstream discussion about abolition now than there was then.Living in Chicago, you see police more, but also maybe come into contact with situations where you might be more inclined to default to calling the police. I look back on this with real shame and embarrassment, but there have been a couple situations in Chicago where I have called the police that have made me rethink that impulse in a big way. My experiences of dealing with police have always been experiences of futility, of not resolving anything and creating the potential to make things worse than doing nothing at all.The Courtroom Artist Residency project was ended by Covid when it was no longer possible to attend court in person, so after working on some other projects, I turned to listening to the police over the scanner channels which anyone can access online. The Police Scanner project was another side, it was another kind of perspective, it was more at the moment that people are being arrested or being chased or that someone is calling 911 and the 911 operators directing the police toward a particular address or a particular person. When you talk about being an abolitionist versus making abolitionist art, that “We Would Feel Safer Without Police” poster, I mean that is sloganeering, that is a slogan on a piece of paper. But it's definitely a provocation toward having a larger conversation about whether the police make us feel safe or not, or what it would take for some people feel safer. Some people are not prepared to say that they would feel safer without police, but you can start to talk about what other mechanisms could be in place or what social services could be, and what it would take to be able to own that feeling. But the Courtroom Artist Residency and Police Scanner, they're not skewed in a particular way to prove an ideology, while also hopefully resulting in documents and materials that are useful to people who believe in abolition, who are thinking about abolition. I suspect that police officers could read the notes from Police Scanner and use them as evidence that their work is really hard and dangerous, and it's clear that we should be giving more money to the police. It's also very possible to read those notes and see that they keep asking for people who are trained in crisis intervention training, and no one is readily available with that training, and a person is having some kind of episode where they need mental health care, and we have this system that tasks police with doing something that a lot of them aren't trained to do. Or police aren't supposed to engage in foot chases—then why are they clearly doing that during the incident I'm listening to? Or why are police tasked with so much busy work around the placement of parked cars, or responding to complaints about unhoused people sitting where people don't want them to sit or sleep?The material from the Courtroom Artist Residency Reports could be used in a bunch of ways as well. Judges could read the Courtroom Artist Residency notes and probably say “Wow, look at how many people we deal with who are just completely disrespectful,” and other people could read the notes and say: Wow, this person's life has been on hold for 5 years because of how slowly the system moves, and the judge showed up 45 minutes late, and this person has a hard enough time being employed while in the court system, and now they potentially might risk losing their job because they took a day off that they couldn't take off or they weren't paid because they couldn't be at work and they don't get paid vacation time and they're already living in poverty and have a very precarious situation and the court makes it very difficult for them to survive without running afoul of their families that are supporting them, or their employer. I mean, you could make a whole argument around acoustics in the courtrooms and how impossible it is for myself and the residents [Courtroom Artist Residency participants] to hear so much of what was happening. How is that for families, or how is it for victims attending a trial or attending a hearing where they can barely hear any of the people who are not the judge, testifying, speaking to the judge about the case that involves either them directly or a family member?It's just a fact of their structure that the courts and police deal with these impossibly large, complicated, nuanced things that require an enormous amount of time and listening and questioning and discernment to attempt to untangle. In terms of court, there's really almost nobody there in the room who's trying to make sense of it who does not have some direct role in what's happening, who's not the family or not connected to a victim in some way, who is just there to see what happens and to bear witness to the system. Unless it's a well-publicized case, you just see very, very few people who seem to be doing that. I feel like if there were other people doing what I was doing, I would have noticed them at some point. Because the judges started to notice me over time and, occasionally, I have been put on the spot, which was uncomfortable. It was clearly unusual to them that I was there, in the case of things that other people were not there for. One thing that happens is that as more and more cases are called, when they're blowing through like 30 people in 3 hours, gradually there are just fewer and fewer people in the court, and one day we got to the point where it was the artist Dmitry Smarov and I, and maybe two other people, and the judge asked us if we had a case, and I said no, we're just observing, and that was that, and then another case with Tom Burtonwood, the judge was more curious and kind of called us over and asked us more directly why we were there, and I said we were just observing, and she pressed us for a little bit more information. I said that I'm a teacher, that I teach high school, and I think I maybe mentioned that I'm interested in better understanding the court system, or something like that.There was another residency, with Bea Malsky, where we went to the same court of the judge who tried Jason Van Dyke, and we popped our heads in, and he was there with a couple of lawyers, there was not much else going on, so we left, and one of the security guards came out after us and asked if we were waiting for something or whatever, and I said that we were just observing. He explained that they were about to begin jury selection, and I asked what the case was and learned it was some kind of a gun case. I said okay, and then we went to another courtroom, and then after about 25 minutes or so, that courtroom went into recess. I said to the resident, “Do you want to go back to that court and watch jury selection?” We both agreed that could be interesting.So we went back into the courtroom, and it still hadn't quite started, and the judge, who the resident thought absolutely recognized me from having attended multiple days of Jason Van Dyke's trial, called us both to the bench and asked why we were there, and I said that we were just interested in observing the court, and then he got all excited and said, “Oh if you're just observing, what we're doing today is a very, very important part of the process. What are you doing on Monday? Can you come back on Monday? We're going to do the jury selection today. The case we'll probably start on Monday. Sit in the very last row. Be quiet.” Bea Malsky thought he recognized me from Jason Van Dyke's trial, and this was like a display of his power, and it certainly felt that way. I walked up there, and I was kind of like “How do I stand, with my arms and my hands behind my back like people who have been charged?” But that's an awkward way to stand if you don't have really good shoulder mobility or something. So I stood with my hands by my sides. And then we stayed, and we watched jury selection for like 2½ hours. It was absolutely fascinating.I took exactly one ethnographic film class in undergrad. We watched (Frederick Wiseman's documentary film) High School, and then, also when I was in college, Titicut Follies was broadcast on PBS. This is like 1991 or something, and it was a huge deal because that film had been banned for years and years and years. It was filmed inside this prison for the criminally insane—to use that shitty language of the sixties. I remember recording it on VHS and watching it multiple times. I became very interested in Wiseman's process, that he really didn't do a ton of research before choosing a lot of the institutions that he would film, would learn a ton through observation, and he would shoot hundreds of hours of footage, and then the main work really happened in editing and shaping the film, deciding who the central types of people are in each institution that should be included. So if you make a film about high school, you would want to film the principal, you would want to film the disciplinarian, you would want to film the person who teaches Phys Ed, you would want to film the bully and the parents of the bully meeting with the principal, you would want to find the kid who was bullied and that kid's parents, or if there are certain types of things that are part of the high school culture, you know, like people eating food in the cafeteria or whatever, that's probably something you would try to film. So that whole strategy of spending quite a while in a place and being open to just seeing what happens there, and what the rhythm of it is, is appealing to me, and a big part of how I work.For the Courtroom Artist Residency, we would try to get to court before it was in session. I and the resident would join the line of people going through the metal detector, which would be separated into the male line and the female line, because there are two separate lines to enter the building. We would be sitting among everyone else waiting for court to start, and everyone has to rise when the judge walks in, and everyone sits down when you're told you can sit down—participating in the experience of that structure, seeing where the cafeteria is. You can go to one of the higher floors across from the State's Attorney Kim Foxx's office, and there's a really amazing view of the west side. We would take the elevator up to different areas in different parts of the building, and we would check out several different kinds of courtrooms. The structure of the spaces is quite different. Some courts have this thick glass, and then court happens inside that space, and there's a speaker in the sitting area, which is very small, and so it's like you're in an aquarium. It's very hard to hear anyone who's not miked; it's almost impossible unless the judge leaves the door to the chamber open, which they often don't.It's often my way with projects like the Courtroom Artist Residency to do something large over a spread-out period of time, so where Frederick Wiseman might spend 16 days straight in a place, I spent 16 days over a spread of about 16 months. Ultimately, I observed court for a long time and was ruminating on it in between each residency, but I was also doing other things and working on other projects. With listening to the police scanner, I did that every day continuously for 75 days; the only day I skipped was my birthday. I was turning 50, and I refused to listen to the police on my birthday. But I would only listen for up to about an hour, not usually more than that. It wasn't the only thing I would do in a day. There were times where I listened for 15 minutes, and I felt like I had recorded an entire narrative in that time, and that maybe for the purposes of the reader, I would focus on just that one narrative and then stop. Sometimes I could show something in quite a linear way; other times, things were extremely fragmented because of tuning into something after it already started, or not being clear how it would progress, or not being able to hear something that seemed important and having to stop taking notes. But I felt like I did that project long enough to maybe hear some of the same dispatchers respond to different kinds of things, or listen at very different times of the day, different days of the week, after different noteworthy things that happened, like listening on Election Day to see if something was noticeably different about that, or in good weather or in bad weather or on a weekend at night or on a weekend early in the morning, or in the middle of the day, or from different parts of the city, so I wasn't always listening to the same part of the city. I tried to spread my attention around all of these different police zones—sometimes listening to many zones in one session, sometimes just staying fixed on the same one for 45 minutes or so.When I finally stopped working on Police Scanner, I was surprised that it felt like an enormous weight had been lifted off of my head or something. Because it was so fucking awful, constantly every day, pretty much. There were descriptions of things that pissed me off, or just all kinds of horrible stuff: people are removing the contents of a dead person's apartment, domestic abuse, things that are just very upsetting to hear. There was one day where a teacher observed child abuse over Zoom while teaching and called the police, and it haunted me all day. It was interesting to think about that, just in terms of the dispatchers hearing that all the time. And thinking about how the dispatcher sets the tone at times for what police are responding to. Sometimes I felt like they were doing that in a way that seemed dismissive of the importance of the call, so they were setting the tone, perhaps, for the police to also treat the call in a dismissive way. Other times, they seemed to try to describe what was happening in a way that captured what they felt was the urgency of the situation, while also trying to be very clear and as precise as possible. They're interesting to listen to as communicators, and I think they're highly skilled communicators, so if you were to abolish the police, you might still want to utilize the talents of these people to maybe dispatch people who are not police to deal with a particular situation. It's like if you have someone who's good at auctioning art, they would probably also be very good at auctioning cattle or cars.The one place where dispatchers get really concerned is when they're worried about an officer, so you would hear when someone is giving chase to a suspect, the dispatchers frantically want to know where that officer is at all points in the chase. They are really concerned about the well-being of their colleagues. You never hear them express concern for a suspect or about people in the area who might be impacted by the actions of police during a chase.Working on these projects is an interesting place to be, because it's not journalism. Although journalists do some similar things, it's not documentary work or news reporting. There are standards for those things that artists don't have to follow, but also I'm not trying to tell one specific story, so what I like with the residency is that we could talk about all kinds of things. We could talk about architectural details of the room, we could talk about what people wore, we could talk about how people spoke. We could just comment on anything; it was completely wide open. Some of those observations could address things that happened for 30 seconds, and we don't have to know how to fit them in, or they don't have to be shoehorned into some other narrative; they can just be a moment that felt pertinent to describe. And so there's a lot of freedom there, too, to talk about anything without having to adhere to a larger, more specific assignment or something like that. Similarly, when I visited the prison, I was a volunteer, never an employee. That in-between place is a fascinating place to be. It certainly meant something different to the prisoners when they learned that I wasn't trying to get a job at the prison.When I listened to the police, I would pick and choose what to include or not include. Every time the police asked for the dispatcher to run a plate, I did not include that because I didn't include people's license plate numbers. I didn't include every single time a police officer wanted to go to lunch, telling them where they were going, but sometimes I'd include the dispatcher saying “Bon appétit” or “Have a nice lunch,” because that is also part of listening to the police.