In 1991, soon after he was sentenced to 56 years in an Ohio prison for a crime he did not commit, Roger Dean Gillispie began pestering fellow inmates to save the tinfoil from their tobacco pouches. He also gathered discarded teabags and cassette tapes—anything he could get his hands on to serve as makeshift building materials.
Then each evening, after he returned to his cell from one of his prison jobs, he devoted countless hours to creating a model of a shiny, vintage Airstream camper. It was, for him, a symbol of freedom—of the day when he would prove his innocence, leave prison behind, and see the country in just such a camper.
“Art was my daily escape,” Dean recalled. “It allowed me to live in the world that I was creating. The prison was short one inmate because, in my mind, I wasn’t there.”