COLUMN | 'Living and Loving Under the Carceral State' With Pardon My Craft

Pain has a way of reorganizing time. It stretches minutes into years, compresses decades into a single phone call, and teaches the body to live inside countdowns and court dates and visiting hours. It also teaches how to hold two overlapping truths: that love can be sustaining, and it can also, under the carceral state, be grinding, exhausting, and quietly radical.

What the women of Pardon My Craft have learned, together, is that pain does not require solitude. And love, especially love under the carceral state, does not require permission.

When I first visited one of their gatherings in late November, the room felt gently ordinary, deliberately so. And yet nearly everyone in that room, eight in all, was tethered, emotionally, to a prison. This monthly art collective was formed by family members and partners of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. In the plainest terms, it is a group of women who have learned to love through concrete, razor wire, surveillance, bureaucracy, and the kind of institutional indifference that can turn an ordinary Tuesday into a crisis. They are not imprisoned by the system, but they are shaped, and often traumatized, by it all the same.

At the November gathering, everyone in attendance went around the table introducing themselves. Names first. Then the names of their loved ones. Then the years. Seventeen years served. Twenty-two served. Forty-four to go. Sixty-three to go. Time here was not a metaphor. It was a sentence.

The group's exhibition, Living and Loving Under the Carceral State, now on view at the King Street Station Gallery, emerged directly from these gatherings. The work is varied — visual art, craft, mixed media — but it shares a common grammar: intimacy without sentimentality. Grief without exploitation. Love without apology.

Someone joked that they don't say married for "life." They say "until clemency." A small act of linguistic rebellion. A refusal to let the state name the horizon.

America prefers its incarceration narratives orderly: crime, punishment, and closure. What those narratives erase is the long middle, the decades of waiting, adapting, supporting, surviving. Families become what the National Institute of Justice calls "hidden victims," absorbing the emotional, financial, and logistical costs of imprisonment without recognition or support. Pardon My Craft exists in that long middle. It is where the hidden becomes visible, if only to one another.

Chelsea Moore, an educator, organizer, and artist featured in the exhibit, said something that stayed with me: Dealing with the carceral system is so stressful that creating together offers "a little alleviation." Not freedom. Not relief. Alleviation. A modest word for a modest mercy. In a system designed to overwhelm, even small reprieves matter.

Britteni Davis, who is pregnant and planning a gender reveal while her partner Antoine Davis serves year 17 of a 63-year sentence, spoke with a clarity that cut through the cultural noise surrounding incarceration. "I'm not married to the Green River Killer," she said, naming the grotesque assumptions people often make. She's married to someone who was 21 and made a split-second decision after witnessing his best friend get shot. What their relationship has become is almost disarmingly ordinary: They talk about bills. About appointments. She sends him her OB schedule. He checks dates. It is, she said, "very normal."

Normal is a subversive claim when the world expects spectacle.

Loving someone who is incarcerated is often treated as evidence of brokenness, of poor judgment, of moral deficiency, of some latent flaw. In this room, that story had no oxygen. The women gathered here include artists, lawyers, educators, nonprofit workers, service workers, single mothers. Their commonality is not pathology. It is proximity to a system that punishes expansively and indiscriminately.

Alison Bremner, a contemporary Tlingit artist whose work is on display at the exhibit, described how she first came to the gatherings just to keep her hands busy. "Most of the time I don't even bring a project, I come to visit," she said, with a laugh that held both humility and truth. Over time, she realized the art itself wasn't the center. Listening was. Presence was. "When someone starts talking," she said, "everyone's like, 'Me too.'"

That shared recognition, their quiet chorus of agreement, is what isolation cannot withstand.

Candace McGrue, whose husband has already come home after decades inside, articulated something that reentry discourse rarely touches. When her partner returned, resources flooded toward him. Programs. Support. Guidance. Yet none of it was for her. "I did time too," she said. "I carry trauma too. But nobody acknowledges that."

Pardon My Craft counters that erasure by insisting on collective care, and, eventually, collective visibility. The group's exhibit centers those who "carry the weight of incarceration even when we aren't the ones behind bars." One in four women in the United States has had a family member incarcerated, yet these experiences remain largely invisible. The show makes them legible — not as data points, but as lives. It reveals how separation and surveillance shape domestic routines, parenting, intimacy, and time itself.

The group's name carries a deliberate irony. These women need no pardon. Not for loving who they love. Not for refusing shame. Not for creating beauty in the shadow of punishment. The phrase echoes the apology society demands of them, then rejects it entirely.

Throughout the evening, humor surfaced — dry, sharp, necessary. Stories about visit-room absurdities. Rules enforced unevenly. Bodies scanned, shoes measured, dignity negotiated. Laughter became a release valve, a way of refusing the total seriousness the system demands.

And still, tenderness prevailed. Someone made paper sunflowers for a child's birthday. Another strung friendship bracelets. Britteni planned music bingo for her gender reveal. These gestures mattered because they insisted that joy is not a betrayal of suffering. It is a companion to it.

The group often returns to a phrase from abolitionist Mariame Kaba: "Hope is a discipline. Not optimism. Not denial. A practice. One you return to even after disappointment." Martina Kartman, an attorney, restorative justice advocate, co-founder of Collective Justice, and another artist featured in the exhibit, spoke about clemency hopes raised and then denied, and how this group was the first place she turned. "They understand the fear of hope," she said. "And the disappointment after hope."

That understanding cannot be institutionalized. It must be practiced together.

America incarcerates more people than any other nation and offers their families almost nothing in return — not recognition, support, or relief. In that void, spaces like Pardon My Craft are not supplemental. They are essential. They show us what the carceral state obscures: that punishment radiates outward, that love persists anyway, that art can be both refuge and record.

When I left that night, crafts remained unfinished on the table. That felt right. The work here is not about completion. It is about continuation, of care, connection, and lives lived in defiance of being rendered invisible.

Living and Loving Under the Carceral State will be displayed from now until Feb. 4 at the ARTS at King Street Station Gallery.

Editors' Note: This column was updated to corrected the spelling of names and correct a quote.

Marcus Harrison Green is the South Seattle Emerald's editor-at-large.