Prisoners’ Inventions

The unmissable new edition of a maker classic for a carceral nation.

2003’s PRISONERS INVENTIONS is an underground classic, a high-stakes precursor to MAKE Magazine, combining ingenuity, adversarial interoperability, and user-centered design. After 13 years out of print, Half Letter Press published a new, expanded edition.

https://halfletterpress.com/prisoners-inventions-new-edition/

Prisoners’ Inventions was created by Angelo, a pseudonymous, long-serving incarcerated American who entered into a collaboration with the Temporary Services collective, who both published Angelo’s work and staged multiple gallery showings of his work.

For these shows, museum workers followed Angelo’s finely drafted, detailed drawings and notes to recreate the inventions he’d documented, recreating his cell from the floorplans and elevations he’d supplied.