Artists who served time have told me they’ve seen how their work can break this cycle, cutting past prejudices and helping other people see them as capable of redemption. “If we experience the art being created in those spaces,” Hughes said, “we will know, ‘These are human beings, and we need to rethink whether we should be throwing them away.’”
There are, of course, some in prison who don’t appear to be contrite after harming others, but in my decade of visiting prisons, I’ve found they are the exception; American prisons are full of earnest attempts at redemption.
(This matches my experience in both jails and prisons. Some mock they are full of innocent people. And that is a claim too common to be true. But there are also many who are honestly trying to find a new path…and, strangely, both of those things can be true within the same person.)
There are hopeful signs that our prison system could return to seeing music as a way to maintain hope inside — and prepare society to accept the people they’re going to release. In 2020, men at San Quentin State Prison were given clearance to release a stellar mixtape, while others were featured on “Ear Hustle,” the popular podcast made in the facility. One of the podcast’s hosts, Earlonne Woods, told me that a good prison artist, like the formerly incarcerated rapper Antwan Banks Williams, gives voice to the emotions that lots of people are experiencing inside.
—Maurice Chammah
—found in Redemption Songs: The Forgotten History of American Prison Music (archive)