Our Lyrics Will Not Be on Lockdown: An Arts Collective’s Response to an Incarceration Nation

• In Event: Stopping the STOPP: An Urgent Call to Critical Educators to Interrupt the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Abstract

Outraged by the unprecedented proliferation of prisons in the United States, Blackout Arts Collective (BAC), a grassroots organization working to empower communities of color through the arts, education, and activism, launched a national tour – Lyrics on Lockdown (LOL): Slamming the Prison Industrial Complex(PIC). This paper examines the impact of the national tour across five years to prisons, halfway houses, youth detention centers, and drug-treatment facilities in order to address the root causes of crime, reduce recidivism, and support the educational growth and development of incarcerated youth and adults.

Additionally, the author raises the question: What is the role of arts when human rights, particularly the civil liberties of people of color, are threatened by an increasingly punitive police state? In such dangerous times the arts may serve as a miner’s canary calling attention to injustice and inequity (Guinier and Torres 2002); to emphasize the humanity and amplify the voices of those affected by social and political crisis; and to inspire transformation.

Through a critical exploration of LOL tour archival materials including workshop curricula, participant writing and art/work samples, program proposals and schedules, training documents and notes, audio and video recordings, evaluations, and subsequent publications, as well as interviews with and reflections by BAC members informed the author’s analysis of BAC activity during the annual LOL tour and accompanying year-round campaign. In particular, the paper examines the LOL workshops that provided opportunities for young people to cultivate a critical understanding of the PIC as it related to their experiences as youth-of-color, many of whom were living in poverty before being arrested and/or detained.

Ultimately, the paper explores the capacity for the arts and artistic expression to, as Maxine Greene (1994) writes, invite ‘‘us to visions of the possible rather than the predictable; it permits us, if we choose to give our imaginations free play, to look at things as if they could be otherwise” (pp. 494-5). Highlighting the opportunities for young people to cultivate literacy and artistic skills, as well as envision alternatives to incarceration, the paper presentation will demonstrate the ways in which LOL iis part of the continuum of the 1960s Prison Arts Movement and a platform for young people to give voice to the vitality of their creativity as a tool for transformation, healing, and justice.

Author

• Keisha L. Green, Rutgers University - New Brunswick/Piscataway