“Redemption Songs”: What This Journalist Wants People to Know About Incarcerated People Making Music

In a place known for restrictions and punishment, incarcerated people are creating music as a form of expression, resistance and humanity, sometimes working independently or with help from the outside. Some have produced entire records, performed at events, and created makeshift music studios while incarcerated.

Last month, journalist Maurice Chammah of The Marshall Project started a limited newsletter called “Redemption Songs” where each week he publishes an essay about records made in prison. Recognizing that music is a humanizing element and “exploring how music offers routes to rehabilitation, redemption and resistance,” according to TMP, Chammah said he hopes that the newsletter series will inspire empathy with the outside world and encourage them to engage with art from incarcerated artists.

The following is a Q&A with Chammah:

What made you want to do a project on the intersection of incarceration and music?

The story starts for me many years ago, when I was first starting out at the Marshall Project around 2014 and I found this record for sale that was made in a Texas prison in the 1970s. I bought it off eBay, and thought the music was really interesting, and learned through it that there used to be this rodeo in Texas prisons. There were people from the free world who would come watch incarcerated people perform. It just struck me as this interesting anecdote from a long time ago, and maybe the prison system looked different in various ways than it does today.

Then I kind of put it aside, it was just sitting on a shelf. I spent all these years reporting on the criminal justice system, and at a certain point, I started to feel a certain amount of hopelessness in the air around the effort to make the prison system sort of better, more humane in various ways. It seemed like good ideas would show up and get traction for a little while, but then, kind of a knee jerk, tough on crime impulse would take back over and ensure that any kind of inspiring efforts would remain really small. There was just a sense of we’ve been trying to reform the criminal justice system to make it more humane, less brutal, less racist for all of these years, and like, what and the normal ways that we typically go about it, whether it’s investigative journalism or advocacy work or just like, keep running into walls.

I realized that that wall is very much an empathy gap and that music by incarcerated people is just a way that you can challenge the empathy gap, because music is just an artistic expression in general and a way to kind of get to people’s hearts and sort of get past some of that sense that these people are different from us.

What is the significance of having a creative or expressive outlet like music during incarceration?

I think that it’s a two way street. I think, on the one hand, incarcerated people get a lot out of

being able to create music, whether it’s writing, rapping, recording, taking lessons on an instrument. There is a rehabilitative aspect to any kind of artistic expression and work that people do in prisons.

I also think that it works the other way. It’s valuable in that it helps the public get a more human lens on people behind bars, which is important because we shouldn’t treat anybody as a throwaway or monster. But also when you humanize people, it makes it easier for the public to imagine welcoming people back to society.

So the benefit of artistic expression for incarcerated people is partially that it shows the public that they’re just sort of regular people who have made mistakes and are trying their best. In theory, could pave the way towards a kinder society when they come out and make it easier to find jobs or housing.

What are your thoughts on the creativity involved with how people in prison make music? How does that speak to resiliency, passion and creativity?

In circumstances where they are facing a lot of restrictions, it forces them to be creative. The artists themselves weren’t creating the limitations the institutions were, but they were still responding creatively.

So one example was turning phones into microphones. Some people in prisons were breaking the law and using illegally smuggled cell phones to make music, which is a form of resistance that really can get you in a lot of trouble because it very specifically breaks rules. In other cases, the prison is allowing music, but there’s creativity in how you just make a good recording setup in the prison. So Freer records, who we feature in the first issue, explains how they’ll use PVC pipe and janitor’s closets and gymnasiums in these facilities, and kind of set them up to be as much like a studio as they can.

I think prison artists have benefited from just the general way that technology has evolved so that it’s easier to record music without an expensive studio than it ever has before. I think in the 60s and 70s, you needed a fairly expensive set of equipment to make music that sounded professional. That is less and less true really, by the year, by the decade.

I also think another part of it is there are famous rappers, there are things like Freer records that are actively trying to promote their work, but there’s also a lot of music that gets made in prison in the context of like educational or therapeutic programs where the music is being made for some purpose that’s very personal to the artist. Maybe there are small concerts that go on, but there’s nobody who’s, like, actively making the effort to kind of publicize this music to the public. And I felt like the Marshall Project and I could play a kind of beneficial role in just sort of showing the public what all is going on when it comes to music in prison.

How do you hope it humanizes people in prison, or insights you hope people glean from it?

I hope people enjoy the music, and I hope that as they enjoy it, they realize that they’re feeling a human connection with the artists that they might not have otherwise felt, and that it helps challenge some of their preconceived notions about empathy and how hard it can be to empathize with people in prison. I’d say that that’s kind of my main hope for it.

Then I hope that it makes people more curious to kind of engage in all kinds of ways artistically with what people in prison are doing. My hope is that someone who likes this music might be more likely to buy a novel written by someone in prison, or read an essay or look at a piece of art.

I think we would all benefit if the walls of prisons were a little more porous in terms of what we’re all engaging with. A very simple goal for this project, and for the Marshall Project generally, is just to kind of make it so that more people just remember how many people are in prison and think about that a little more often, because the system is, by design, very often easy to forget about unless you have a direct connection to it, like unless you have a loved one inside. This music is trying to help, in a kind of friendlier way, remind people not to forget about all of these people behind bars.