Give Leonard Jefferson a pen and paper, and he can draw anything. Paint, too—whether it be watercolors, acrylics, or charcoal, Jefferson does it all. He is also skilled at silk screen printing, making stained glass, and sewing.
Jefferson perfected all of these crafts in an unlikely place: prison.
He is still trying to get the murder conviction that landed him in prison overturned, claiming that he did not rob and murder Providence landlord Virginio DeFusco (who was found dead in his apartment building) on the evening of December 7, 1973. He served almost fifty years of his original conviction—a life sentence—and was released on parole from the Adult Correctional Institutions in December 2019.
During the almost fifty years he spent in prison, Jefferson turned to art, his favorite childhood pastime, in order to stay sane.
For three of those fifty years, Jefferson had only a flute, a few pencils, and sheets of printer paper with which to make music and art. In 1976, the installation of the Arts and Corrections Program introduced inmates to state-provided instruments, crochet and ceramics classes, and free painting supplies that revolutionized Jefferson’s experience.
Art, Jefferson insisted, wasn’t a way to escape his circumstances at the ACI. Rather, he used his abilities to amplify the injustices he saw while incarcerated.
“It wasn’t an escape from reality because for a lot of pieces, the subject matter is reality,” Jefferson said. “Art is a way to tell the story.”
Finding freedom through art
In 1978, an inmate named Joe Benton moved into the cell next to Jefferson’s. They quickly became friends. Benton was a guitarist, so the two wrote and performed music together. Most of the time, it was just the two of them, but occasionally they performed as a band in the yard within the prison walls, with Benton on guitar alongside a singer, a keyboard player, a bass player, a drummer, and Jefferson, who did “a little bit of everything.”
Jefferson, Benton explained, wasn’t the physical fighter that correctional officers expected from incarcerated people. Instead, Jefferson fought through his art. “Nine times out of ten [the officers weren’t] prepared to fight that way,” Benton said.
In 1980, the Department of Corrections allowed Jefferson to move to a minimum security prison—but told him he couldn’t bring his art supplies.
“I remember this like it was yesterday. He wanted his paintings, his paints, his tools, his artistic stuff. And in minimum security they wouldn’t let him have it. So he packed up his stuff and came back to maximum,” Benton said.
Benton was shocked. He remembers thinking, “Don’t you want your freedom?”
But Benton said that day showed him that freedom comes in many forms: “Jefferson showed me that in his heart, in his mind, there was a greater freedom than what was out beyond the walls. When they offered him freedom, and he couldn’t have those things that made him free, he rejected their idea of freedom.”
Critiquing the criminal justice system through art
On Jan. 18, 1985, after 11 years, Jefferson was released from the ACI.
Eight years later, he was convicted of the aggravated assault of his former girlfriend Andreau Webb, who claimed that he hit her several times “full force” with a baseball bat.
While Jefferson disputed Webb’s claim, a Pennsylvania judge sentenced Jefferson to prison for aggravated assault. He spent the next 20 years—the maximum sentence for the conviction at the time—incarcerated in Pennsylvania.
In the State Correctional Institution at Albion, correctional officers seized three of his paintings during a routine cell search. Two were portraits of Osama Bin Laden, and one was of a Black female prison guard titled “Sista-matized,” which correctional officers said had “negative connotations of corrections officers, judges and the criminal justice system,” according to a Huffington Post article. Jefferson sued the prison for violating his First Amendment rights.
Jefferson won the case, and Erie County Judge John Garhart ordered Sista-matized to be returned to Jefferson, stating: “While a prisoner may not, with art or speech, incite or inflame, he retains the right protected by the Constitution to criticize the system that put him there.”
On Nov. 5, 2013, Jefferson was escorted back to Rhode Island. While he was incarcerated in Pennsylvania, the Rhode Island parole board had revoked his parole and sentenced him to life without parole. Although Jefferson was entitled to a hearing, the parole board refused to grant him one and Jefferson found himself back at the place he was released from almost 30 years before.
Same place, new era
Jefferson spent the next six years incarcerated at the ACI. In the previous decades, “tough on crime” efforts had accelerated under President Reagan, who signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986. As U.S. prisons became more crowded, resources dwindled for prison educational programs, and the need for heightened security increased.
All of this led Jefferson to enter a very different ACI in 2013 from the one he knew from 1973. Now, correctional officers didn’t allow instruments, so Jefferson was forced to leave his keyboard in Pennsylvania. He was only allowed printer paper and pens—no oil paints and no canvas.
“There’s no other way to describe it than just hatred,” Jefferson said of the restrictions.
On Oct. 27, 2015, prison guards searched Jefferson’s cell after discovering through his mail correspondence that he was writing a book. They found Complexion Connection, a drawing Jefferson made after reading the August 12 Boston Globe article entitled, “Driver Charged After 7 Revere Officers Injured During Arrest.” The article describes how Joseph Parker, a white man, was ordered by police to stop in a construction zone in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Parker knocked one police officer unconscious, struggled with several others as he was arrested, and challenged officers to a fight as they escorted him to his cell.
Despite these repeated offenses, “you’ll notice he does not have a mark on him,” Jefferson said of Parker, center and bottom right in the drawing.
Struck by the sheer racial injustice, he tried to depict Parker’s actions in Complexion Connection, arguing that “a Black man would’ve been killed three times over in this situation.” Prison guards confiscated the drawing, claiming it depicted inmates rising up against correctional officers.
Jefferson served 20 days of solitary confinement for the drawing and had to file a lawsuit in order to get it back.
Jefferson remembers solitary confinement as “a tough punishment,” believing that he was only able to stay sane through his connection with God and motivation to fight the injustices he experienced. To prove a point, Jefferson didn’t leave his cell during the one hour he was given to shower and take a walk.
“I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction,” he said. “My mind was free, but they had my body. You’re in trouble in prison when your mind is stuck there. If they can get to your mind, you’re done.”
On December 12, 2018, Jefferson received a parole hearing. His case was accepted, and after enrolling in several year-long courses to prepare him for release, Jefferson was freed on December 18, 2019.
Life outside prison walls
For about a year, Jefferson lived in a small bedroom on the first floor of a home run by Open Doors—a community reentry program based in Pawtucket that provides housing and counseling services to recently released incarcerated individuals.
One of Jefferson’s parole requirements was community service, so he began volunteering for a nonprofit organization dedicated to social, political and economic justice for underprivileged groups in Providence called DARE: Direct Action for Rights and Equality. Today, he makes signs and art for the many car rallies and protests that DARE organizes around prisoner justice, racial inequities and more.
Anusha Alles—staff organizer for Behind the Walls, DARE’s prison abolition committee—notes that Jefferson became a leader within the space as soon as he got involved with the organization. “More than anything,” Alles said, “it’s the spirit that he brings. He just is so deeply committed to freedom for himself and for people behind bars and for formerly incarcerated people. He really lives and breathes that struggle and does it with a lot of love and compassion.”
Jefferson’s work has been crucial for DARE. Alles considers the important role his art plays as “the thing that the public interfaces with…the thing that brings people into our campaigns, [and] that educates people about what we’re doing.”
In October 2020, Jefferson moved out of Open Doors and into a two-bedroom apartment in Bristol on a street that dead-ends into the bay. “It’s almost like a beach house,” he said. “I love it.”
In his free time, Jefferson has been working on musical reconstructions of rhymes from his two books. He’s done performances of these reconstructions with friends from DARE at a few venues, including a birthday party the organization hosted for him last year and a “fireman’s picnic” in July.
Two of Jefferson’s pieces — “Nanna Natural” and “Méri” — are on display at the RISD museum in The Black Biennial exhibit. These paintings are modeled after photographs from National Geographic magazines Jefferson got from the ACI’s library while incarcerated, and were painted in 1980 and 1981, respectively.
For his birthday last month, Jefferson visited his friends and family in Pittsburgh—his one allotted trip for the year. Prior to the trip, Jefferson’s daughter Naomi had only seen her father once in the past 20 years. Despite not seeing them in person, Jefferson remained in touch with his daughters throughout his incarceration, sending them artwork whenever possible.
“The first time I looked at him then, the first thing I noticed was he had a story in his eyes,” Naomi said. She noted that he seemed to have attained a “kind of wisdom” in prison that others lack.
Jefferson is motivated by his unrelenting quest for truth in everything he does, from Sista-matized to DARE projects to his legal battles to lift the murder conviction from his record.
A line from Jefferson’s first book, Pennsylvania Imprisons Blacks at Highest Rate, published in 2012, sums his mission up well:
Torn from the truth we will not survive
The truth is the lifeline that keeps us alive.
Sole Magazine