A Voice in Prison

(Illustration by iStock/estherpoon)

The first thing you lose when incarcerated is your voice. After being stripped of your name and identified by number, your ability to communicate with the outside world is immediately curtailed. Prison is also a place where it can be unsafe to express feelings of joy, anger, sadness, remorse, or regret. But this voicelessness is systemic. Indeed, the system of mass incarceration depends on depriving incarcerated people of their voices and reducing them to rap sheets. If they could speak out of their full humanity, America’s assembly-line systems of mass incarceration would be unsustainable.

Arts programs in prisons have been, for us, an important tool for supporting the advocacy of incarcerated people, helping them break the silence. These programs provide an outlet to work out trauma, to express rage and joy, and to speak about the conditions of imprisonment. And in giving context and depth to those who the dehumanizing systems of mass incarceration require be reduced to ciphers, expression is also politically potent. 

Yet despite their importance—or perhaps because of their evident power to empower people made vulnerable by this system—government support for arts-in-prison programs has been limited (with a few exceptions), pressed by other security and rehabilitative priorities. This is why private funders need to step up to support effective, scaled-up arts programming in prisons: The government views these programs as at best a luxury and at worst outright dangerous. All the more reason why these programs should be seen as a critical tool in the toolbox for any funder interested in challenging the carceral state. More than simply a means of rehabilitation and recidivism prevention—though arts programming can be effective at both—these programs are critical in the struggle to disrupt and dismantle systems of mass incarceration.

To us, this issue is personal. One of us, author Kenyatta Hughes, spent 24 years in New York state prisons, including 13 years at the infamous Sing Sing. While there, Kenyatta worked for 10 years with Musical Connections, a program of Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, which provides men in Sing Sing an opportunity to participate in instrumental and vocal composition. The other, author Jozben Barrett, has worked extensively to help both incarcerated persons and those released from prison develop artistic works in a number of different media.

The Effectiveness of Arts Programming

Arts programs in prisons “work,” no matter how you measure effectiveness. The impact of high-quality educational programs in prison on reducing violence and improving post-release outcomes is well established; a 2013 meta-analysis, for example, found that participation in education programming in prison reduced the odds of recidivism by 43 percent and increased the likelihood of post-incarceration employment by 13 percent. And while there is less research on arts programs specifically, studies have shown that participants report an increased sense of personal agency, better management of time and personal resources, and increased emotional and social self-control. Participants in California’s Arts-in-Corrections program found that participants reported fewer disciplinary issues and better relations with other incarcerated individuals and prison staff. Evaluations of a demonstration project in painting at a prison in New York found the program helped the incarcerated develop better interpersonal relationships and better emotional control. A high-quality evaluation of arts programs in several Nordic nations’ prisons concluded that they improved motivation and social and life skills.

These research findings make sense: Especially in the empty stretches of a long prison sentence, personal development and constructive activity go hand-in-hand.

But regardless of its effect on recidivism or personal development, the most important feature of arts programming in prisons is the direct challenge it poses to America’s punitive carceral system. We’ve seen incarcerated persons use artistic expression—in drama, instrumental or vocal performance, illustration or painting, dance and poetry—to process past trauma, to voice anger, loneliness, optimism, and joy, and especially to challenge prison’s dehumanization and standardization. For example, Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), a nonprofit that works with artists at six prisons in New York, allowed one of us to express our humanity by developing original, classic, and contemporary plays and musical theater pieces that are then shared with the prison population, community guests and families of RTA members. Even prison staff get wrapped up in the performances, as if they are seeing our soul for the very first time. Artistic endeavor and personal expression challenge at a fundamental level the whole underpinning of the carceral state, the racist and classist assumptions that strip incarcerated people of their human dignity. 

The Need for Public Funding

Most juvenile arts programs receive at least some public funding, whether from the state correctional department or a state arts council, with a very few receiving private funding. But our experience in this field is that funding for these programs tends to be episodic rather than sustained. Arts programming is considered an “extra”: Nice to have if the facility budget has a few extra dollars, but not as important as supporting re-entry-focused services such as GEDs, skills training, or substance abuse education.

Some private funders have begun to understand the power of the arts in prison to create social change. In 2017, donor Agnes Gund used the proceeds of the sale of Roy Lichtenstein’s “Masterpiece” to create (along with the Ford Foundation and other donors) the Art for Justice Fund, which challenges mass incarceration and promotes criminal justice reform through artistic expression. The Fund supported the 2019 formation of the Justice Arts Coalition, a national clearinghouse and resource center for persons interested in arts programming in prisons. But, like the state, private funders also tend to focus on re-entry, mental health, and substance use prevention, with arts programming taking a back seat.

Despite these promising initiatives, the fact is that private funders won’t be able to sustain these kinds of programs at scale across the thousands of prisons and jails across the United States. Arts programming in prisons must become a priority for state and local governments—especially now that federal funding through the Pell Grant program is available to incarcerated persons. Right now, an opportunity exists to scale up these programs, taking into account essential best practices:

Affirm the dignity of participants. Prison is dehumanizing, deliberately so. This dehumanization is mandated and justified in the name of “just punishment,” with the system focused on reminding the incarcerated that their conviction and conduct is the most important—indeed, the only important—thing about them. To be effective, arts programming like Music on the Inside (MOTI) should be replicated all across the country. MOTI affirms the human dignity of incarcerated people by giving them a chance to fill in the nuanced details of their personhood, the ones that prison attempts to delete, through the universal language of music.

Offer a sustained experience. A 2008 study of arts programming in juvenile detention facilities found that as many as one-third of programs were short-term, meeting weekly (or less) for less than an hour. These programs will amount to little more than arts-and-crafts sessions. To learn an artistic craft, and the greatest benefits of any program will be achieved when participants are able to engage psychologically with the work. That requires a sustained effort, over weeks, with multiple opportunities per week. A great example is Theaters of Wars Productions, which engages incarcerated persons in full-scale classic productions of classic plays, including Shakespeare and the canon of Greek tragedies. This is a sustained and focused effort, requiring weeks of preparation.

Center individual experiences. Especially given the near-total lack of effective therapeutic mental health treatment in prison, arts programming provides one of the few structured opportunities for incarcerated people to speak directly about trauma, emotion, and joy in a way that assists rehabilitative efforts and encourages emotional and social development. While instruction on formal means of expression can be helpful, the focus needs to be on individual experience and not the formal rules of a particular medium.

Provide opportunities for performance. Self-expression is step one. But prison arts programs cannot and should not be a closed loop. Every artist needs interaction with an audience in order to grow. Moreover, performances such as the TedX performance participated have important second-order effects: They help to humanize and personalize a class of persons, who rarely see rounded or complex depictions of themselves in popular culture. Effective prison arts programs should provide opportunities for the artists to present their works not just to other incarcerated people, but to the communities to which almost all of them will one day return.

Challenge the system. Our thesis is that artistic expression by the incarcerated is, of itself, a challenge to oppressive systems of mass incarceration. Of course, anything that fills out an individual’s complexity is an attack on systemic oppression. But prison arts programs should also challenge mass incarceration and oppressive prison conditions directly. This is where the systems that administer prisons become nervous: Painting and drawing is one thing, activism another. But programs for self-expression have little meaning if they deny the incarcerated the opportunity to confront not just their past, but also their present living conditions and the systems that have condemned them.

Great art speaks truth to power, and there is no power that has such totalizing control over others than America’s assembly-line system of mass punitiveness.

Read more stories by Kenyatta Emmanuel & Jozben Barrett.