Music Programs in Prisons

Program Content

Music programs have traditionally been offered in all kinds of facilities, from lower-security to maximum-security places like Angola and San Quentin. Prison music includes music lessons, playing and performing in groups or bands, and the opportunity to make recordings and/or perform live on radio and television. Historically, prison bands existed in many states in the early 1900s. Today, prison groups and bands sometimes travel outside the prison to perform in parades and at local festivals; others are limited to performing inside the institution for their convict peers only. They have played at rodeos in Texas and still perform at Louisiana's Angola Rodeo. Instruction varies from hiring professional [Page 615]music instructors to volunteers to prisoner teachers. At Angola, Louisiana, in the 1970s, Charles Neville of the Neville Brothers had full-time work duty in the music room as a convict music teacher.

Music programs can be part of larger overall arts programs that include theater, dancing, and painting, while sometimes they are part of other self-help groups organized by the prisoners themselves. They also can be free-standing music programs and/or part of the prisons' recreational program.

Support for Programs

Art and music program advocates believe that such classes restore a sense of humanity and safety that is vital to rehabilitation. The sense of completion and of contribution to the creation of something that society values can help inmates increase their self-esteem and recapture a sense of pride and satisfaction in themselves and their work. Other benefits can include relearning responsibility and discipline through individual and group practice and performance. As part of an all-around rehabilitation program, Superintendent Fred Jones appointed Wendell Cannon as Parchman's first director of music in 1960, although prison bands had existed at Parchman, Mississippi, since the 1940s. Cannon was empowered to exempt his choice of convictmusicians from the field and thus lured the black convicts into the music program; only white convicts had participated in the prison bands to date.

Music and art programs also have been shown to reduce recidivism rates. They provide an alternative to traditional education programs, to which inmates who have had negative experience with schooling in the past may be averse. The open structure of these programs also helps them bring together diverse groups of individuals from different racial, ethnic, geographical, and class backgrounds into a harmonious cooperative atmosphere. As part of a multifaceted program to promote tolerance and mutual respect among its inmates, Ohio's Marion Correctional Institution created “Music in the Air.” One successful participant of a music program observed, “I traded a pistol for a trumpet!” Music programs have even been used as a form of psychotherapy to develop the relationship between the therapist and the client. Therapists believe that music can help individuals who would otherwise have a difficult time expressing themselves. Evaluation of a music therapy program implemented in a female correctional facility concluded that music therapy reduced tension and anxiety while also increasing motivations and ties with reality for the women convicts. Art and music programs have also been used in the treatment of sexual offenders against children.

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