Excerpts from “Not Society’s Trash: The Incarcerated Voice” from Choral Music in Global

Perspective. (de Quadros, 2019). Routledge.

Prisons are central to society; however, most people know little about them. In order to
contextualize what follows, a look at incarceration worldwide is essential. The International
Centre for Prison Studies stated in 2016 that approximately 11 million prisoners were
incarcerated worldwide. Prisons are now a feature of the modern nation-state, but the way in
which these prisons function varies dramatically from country to country…

Those who have studied the sociology of prisons, particularly in America, have been at pains to
point out that prisons generate relational realities far away from the outside world. Drake
stated:

The pains of imprisonment … included several deprivations: liberty, goods and services,
heterosexual relationships, autonomy, and security. These deprivations, in turn,
exercised a destabilising influence that could result in competing prisoner hierarchies,
clandestine activities and illegal markets and a variety of other informal structures and
sub rosa codes of conduct.1

Clemmer (1958) described the adaptation to prison culture as “prisonization,” and likened this
process to “socialization.” Through social interaction, prisoners learn how to conduct
themselves in this distinctive environment…

Incarceration may be viewed as public policy and social practice that extends beyond the
conventional concepts of prison. Australia imprisons more than 1,000 refugees and asylum
seekers (Loewenstein, 2017).2 Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes Gaza as the world’s largest
prison (2018).3 These two examples alone point to the need for a nuanced understanding of the
varying manifestations and diverse practices that could redefine incarceration.

With such a massive imprisoned population, it is not surprising that musicking takes place.
Although little ethnographic work on informal music-making in prisons has been conducted,
one can be relatively certain that the irrepressible desire to sing, to write, to percuss leads to
prison musicking (see, for example, Harbert, 2012; Hirsch 2012), possibly as secret or
unsanctioned activities.

…The paucity of research is difficult to understand but may partly be due to the general lack of
attention to the prison population not only by musicians, music scholars, and music educators,
but also by the public. The way in which prisoners have been discarded has allowed us to

1
Deborah Drake. Sociology of Prison Life (p. 3), see
http://oro.open.ac.uk/40428/1/Elsevier%20encyclopedia%20entry.pdf
2
According to the Refugee Council of Australia, as of 2017, 1,301 such persons are in detention, see
https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/detention-australia-statistics/
3
Ilan Pappé (2018) argues that Gaza is the largest open prison in the world with a population of over one
million.
neglect not just their music-making but their everyday lives. Music in prisons has been under-
studied when one considers the worldwide diversity of prisons. This is not surprising given the
silence about prison life more generally, other than the dramatic and over-simplified views
formed by television programs such as CSI, Prisoner, and Orange is the New Black. Given the
stereotyping of the convicted and imprisoned, sympathy and interest in prisoners’ education
and welfare are in short supply.

… In any event, prisoners are not counted in global statistics documenting choral singing. For
example, neither the Chorus America nor the European Choral Association surveys4,5 of choral
participation factor in, or even attempt to include, the participation of prisoners in choral
music. That is only one reason for the lack of knowledge about prison music…

The title of this chapter—“Not Society’s Trash”—speaks to the silenced voices of the
imprisoned. Prisoners are so hidden from the general population that they can almost be
viewed in the way that we treat trash. Although Peter Benenson’s (1961) pivotal article, “The
Forgotten Prisoners,” which led to the founding of Amnesty International, is about political
prisoners, it holds true for all prisoners; a societal amnesia exists with regard to prisons. The
binary view of prisoners as evil when compared with societal victims facilitates our view that
societies need to lock up criminals, in some cases forever.

In pleading for recognition of her humanness, a Thai former prisoner said eloquently: “We are
not society’s trash,” presenting an overwhelming case for serious reconsideration of the role of
incarceration on the one hand, and, on the other, the case for realizing that rarely are prisoners
so effectively removed from society that their absence has little impact. Indeed, just as trash
has a direct effect on the environment, the air that we breathe and the water we drink, so do
the fates of prisoners and the quality of their treatment affect the lives of their families and
friends. Also affected are the lives of other prisoners, who in turn affect numerous lives on the
outside. If and when they are released, prisoners continue to have an impact, positive or
negative, on society as a whole. Danielle Allen writes about the incarceration tragedy in her
own family in Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. She states, in a radio interview,

when you’ve got 2 million people in prison, every single one of those people is
connected to 20 other people, 40 other people, 50 other people. Every single person in
prison represents a huge impact on our society. More on the order of 20 to 60 million
people being impacted in any given year on account of this. The ripple effects of this are
just tremendous. I think we really have to confront the damage that we’ve done to our
own society with this approach to criminal justice.6

…Prison choirs are so diverse and rarely represented in the literature that it is an obvious
assertion that they embody a world unto themselves. The immense power of music in settings

4
The Chorus Impact Study: How Children, Adults, and Communities Benefit from Choruses. Chorus
America, 2009.
5
See https://europeanchoralassociation.org/cooperation-projects/the-voice-project/
6
See https://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2017/09/07/cuz-two-lives-split-by-society
where men and women have been denied basic freedoms has led me to devote space here to
this topic.

…[We] can no longer ignore the fate of so many people who have been consigned to prisons,
some of whom are innocent, a number of whom have been over-sentenced, and the majority of
whom are poor. To ignore how their musical lives are affected by incarceration is to ignore a
significant portion of the world population. The practices are varied, but commonalities do
exist.

Frequently, choral music expresses spiritual themes; indeed, group singing in prisons discharges
most of the social functions of music itself. Engagement with outsiders, either as part of travel,
or with visitors, motivates participants. Choirs in prison are often ignored, but there are many
and they provide an outlet for singers to be heard, sometimes even outside the prison. Singers
express feelings of strength, solidarity, and purpose in communal song.

At the same time, there is a need to interrogate and question the work, Dreisinger (2016)
comments:

music in prisons is the sweet sound of a salve. Only a tiny minority of prisoners is lucky
enough to profit from them, and weighed against everything else that these
incarcerated people suffer, their fundamental impact remains minuscule. But isn’t some
impact better than none? So it is with writing and music and other arts-behind-bars
programs, as study after study has indicated. A 1983 one, for instance, revealed a 74
percent favorable parole outcome rate for prisoners who participated in a California
arts-based education program. Youth who were part of a Diversion in Music Education
program in South Africa had a 9 percent recidivism rate six months after participation,
which dropped to zero percent after a year. The arts are cathartic … But the arts are also
beautiful. Prisons are not beautiful, whatever gorgeous music or prose might emerge
from them. And at the end of the music or writing or art class, the instructor—me—gets
to exit to freedom, reflecting on the wonderful class and brilliant, grateful, adoring
students—the same students who, meanwhile, must return to the treacherous realities
of their cell blocks. Isn’t it all a cruel tease, giving someone a taste of personhood again,
but only for a few hours a week? … And surely there’s room … for arts programs to work
their healing magic … For all that I love and believe in it, art can be an obstacle to such
imaginings because of the very thing it does so well: dazzle us, and then distract us, with
beauty. (pp. 136–8)

In conclusion, prison choral music may dazzle the outsider by its apparent impact on prison life.
We can only understand it more fully when we come closer to knowing what is going on, and
what real difference group music-making, and choral music in particular, makes to people’s
lives.
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