Listening to this might change you

One morning in 2019, Kenyatta Emmanuel Hughes was released from Fishkill Correctional Facility, in Beacon, N.Y., and traveled roughly 70 miles south to Carnegie Hall. That night he stood before a crowd — flanked by a horn section, a string quartet and backup singers — and sang words he’d written during his nearly quarter-century behind bars.

He’d been convicted of killing a cabdriver during a robbery in 1996, when he was 21 years old. “I had no value for life back then,” he once told a reporter — and that included his own life, which he tried to end while in prison. Now 45, he sang over a steady pulse of piano chords: “Can’t we agree there’s something wrong, if I feel the need to scream, ‘My life matters’? And why in the world, to you, does that feel like an accusation?”

Hughes had studied with conservatory-trained musicians at Musicambia and Carnegie Hall’s Musical Connections, two programs that teach composition and various instruments in prisons. As a criminal justice journalist and musician myself, I’ve long admired such arts programs for cultivating hope and dignity amid all the abuse and neglect, while reducing the chances that people will return to prison.

But focusing on rehabilitation misses the full picture. America has a long history of prison music, and its power goes beyond helping those inside: This music can transform us, changing how we think about the people who make it. When the right song hits you at the right moment, you can recognize something shared with the artist. “There are things you can identify in yourself that you can also identify in them, no matter what they did,” the formerly incarcerated rapper BL Shirelle told me. “You see them for the humans they are.”

Why should you care? Because Americans have reached an impasse when it comes to the criminal justice system. There remains some bipartisan agreement that the system is bloated, expensive, discriminatory and abusive, and that our prisons too often fail at their key goal of rehabilitation (when they’re not outright deadly). But at least 600,000 people leave prisons each year, and despite talk of “second chances,” the rest of us don’t do a great job of helping them restart their lives. People often refuse to rent to them and give them jobs, which then increases the likelihood they’ll end up in prison again.

It’s easy to blame individuals for their criminal actions, but we also know that when society’s treatment of people who commit crimes is too punitive and merciless, the result is often — ironically and tragically — more crime.

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,” Mr. 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. Listening to and sharing music may sound like a soft, superficial way of changing a broken system, but you can’t get policy change if you haven’t paved the way with culture.

It also helps to look backward. The rich history of American prison music — especially before the rise of mass incarceration began 50 years ago — offers some vivid reminders of how we used to be more connected to people in prison.

In the 1930s, a Texas prison broadcast a weekly radio show in which men and women played country songs, blues, hymns and other genres to a live audience of visitors. “Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls” reached as many as five million listeners and received 100,000 fan letters each year, according to Caroline Gnagy’s book, “Texas Jailhouse Music: A Prison Band History.”

Public officials made guest speeches on the show that were striking in their empathy. “Before the advent of radio, prisoners were exiled; citizens outside paid little attention to them,” the governor of Texas, Wilbert Lee O’Daniel, said on the show in 1939. “But now you hear them talk; you hear them sing; you find out they are sons and daughters of good mothers. You find out they made mistakes, thus proving that they are human.”

Prisons were still brutal places — you can hear it in recordings of blues and work songs that Black prisoners sang as they hoed and picked cotton, just like their enslaved ancestors. And yet many wardens also saw how music could keep those inside more hopeful and tethered to the outside world ahead of release. In the 1950s, a doo-wop group called the Prisonaires were allowed to leave their Tennessee facility under armed guard and record at Sun Studio in Memphis. Elvis Presley was reportedly a big fan.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.