Vinny and David

Vinny and David began when Isadora Kosofsky encountered Vinny, then age 13, as he was being booked into a juvenile detention center for stabbing his mother’s assailant in 2012. Since that time, Kosofsky has forged an ongoing relationship with Vinny, his older brother David, and the rest of their family as she documents their navigation of life both inside and outside of New Mexico’s juvenile and adult prison systems.

Kosofsky says, “For the past five years, I have documented the relationship between families and incarceration, focusing on lost intimacy and love as a locus to investigate humanistic elements of the criminal justice system. In the midst of understanding shattered and mended familial bonds in my present life, Vinny and David comments on private questions about the nature of brotherly bonds and alienation.” In addition to Vinny and David, Kosofsky produced a photo essay Still My Mother, Still My Father which features snapshots of parent-child bonding visits at 12 prisons across Florida. Kosofsky says, “Documenting family affords me the opportunity to not only tackle mass incarceration from a humanistic standpoint, but to also explore these experiences as escapes and temporarily fulfilled fantasies for both child and parent.”

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and this number continues to grow, meaning more and more families are being impacted by the criminal justice system. Both Vinny and David and Still My Mother, Still My Father prompt important conversations about the impacts of mass incarceration on families and children, an important first step in reforming the criminal justice system and improving the well-being of children of incarcerated individuals.