Music Making in U.S. Prisons: Listening to Incarcerated Voices by Mary L. Cohen and Stuart P. Duncan (review)

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• Music Making in U.S. Prisons: Listening to Incarcerated Voices by Mary L. Cohen and Stuart P. Duncan
• Brianna J. Suslovic (bio)

Mary L. Cohen & Stuart P. Duncan, Music Making in U.S. Prisons: Listening to Incarcerated Voices (Wilfred Laurier University Press 2022), ISBN 9781771125710, 223 pages.

Arts-based programming in United States (U.S.) prisons can function as a rehabilitative intervention for incarcerated individuals, but it can also function as a human rights intervention, promoting the dignity and worth of some of the most stigmatized and socially isolated individuals in the country. The authors of Music Making in U.S. Prisons provide a well-researched and empirically grounded case for expanding music-making programming in prisons across the U.S., applying a critical lens to the criminal-legal system and the experiences of incarcerated individuals entangled within it.

This book is speaking to the canon of prison-critical authors in the past half-century, including Angela Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?) and Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Abolition Geography). The authors, Mary L. Cohen and Stuart P. Duncan, primarily argue that music-making in and around U.S. prisons has a role to play in dismantling the prison industrial complex.¹ They consider music making as a pathway to self-knowledge, relational skills development with outside individuals, healthy collaboration, and skill-based learning, noting the value of this multifunctionality throughout their writing. Through engagement with abolitionist thinkers such as Mariame Kaba,² the authors offer several case studies of the liberatory potential of various types of music programs in carceral settings, ranging from music collaborations in juvenile detention centers to songwriting workshops in maximum security prisons. Their discussion of the geneses and outcomes of instrumental, choral, and songwriting spaces in carceral settings is informed by a critical historical perspective about the development of music ensembles in prisons and jails over the past century.

In her analysis of a workshop in a Raleigh, North Carolina prison, Ashley Lucas writes about the way in which [End Page 552] many incarcerated individuals “are often characterized as the objects of their own art rather than the agents who created it.”³ When creative work produced by incarcerated artists is consumed outside of prison walls, there runs a substantial risk of dehumanization and stereotyping. Incarcerated artists are expected to fit their creative work into a life narrative of trauma, deviancy, and repentance, which reduces their art to a means of constructing flattening rehabilitation narratives.⁴ Instead, of falling prey to this trope, the authors of Music Making in U.S. Prisons opt for a more nuanced perspective on the role and function of music programming for incarcerated individuals. Cohen and Duncan, both music educators with experience teaching in carceral settings, ground their analyses in their own work, and in the perspectives shared with them by incarcerated music-makers themselves. This on-the-ground approach lends credibility and rigor to their argument.

Cohen and Duncan begin their book with a justification, explaining why music making is a unique and worthwhile object of study for individuals invested in dismantling the U.S. carceral system. They situate their discussion with an acknowledgment that arts and social service program funding has been substantially cut in most correctional institutions in the U.S., and that the rise of mass incarceration has led to a decline in program availability for incarcerated individuals.⁵ From this vantage point, they make the case that music making in prisons can function as a pathway to build bridges between incarcerated communities and their counterparts on the outside. They further argue that healing justice and restorative justice approaches are needed in the U.S. criminal legal system, and that music making creates opportunities for relationality and care that bring the entire system closer to a less-punitive approach.

In their second chapter, Cohen and Duncan take a historical approach to the phenomenon of music in prisons across the U.S. They shed light on little-known cases of successful music ensembles comprised of incarcerated artists, highlighting the creativity and strategy required of music educators, facilitators, and conductors as they developed prison brass bands, choirs, radio programs, blues groups, glee clubs, and orchestras. Given the institutional constraints...