Changing Lives: Incarcerated Female Youth Create and Perform with the Storycatchers Theatre and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra

Roles of Music Making and Prisons in Human Lives

Music making takes on multiple roles in human lives. Some of these functions include integral components of rituals, such as marches to accompany processionals or reflective songs to highlight emotional meanings of a particular event. Often, music making is a means for personal and group self-expression. Christopher Small suggests that through music making, people explore, affirm, and celebrate their identities and relationships with one another. Small defines “music” as a verb and conveys that the most important aspects of “musicking” are the relationships not only among sounds, but also among people. Small is inclusive in his understanding of the people involved in musicking; for example, they might include relationships among the people performing, listening, the person(s) who composed the selections, and the people who influenced the creation of any instrument or aspect of the selections’ musical genre. These relationships are both direct and indirect. Direct relationships occur among performers, for example, while indirect and quite complex relationships happen between a performer and the society that developed a particular musical genre.¹

A different kind of complexity exists within relationships between a person accused of criminal behavior and society. These relationships have gone through extreme changes in the past 200 years. Prior to the United States’ existence, European societies and people living in other parts of the world practiced corporal punishment through public displays of torture, hanging, decapitating, and other forms of capital punishment. When prisons began in the United States, initial intentions were to put an end to brutal displays of physical punishment and to separate people accused of criminal behavior from society. Punishment shifted from bodily torture to isolation from society and from one another. Contemporary research, however, indicates solitary confinement practices result in serious psychiatric, psychological, and physiological negative effects. Between 33 and 90 percent of people who are isolated in prisons undergo adverse symptoms.²

Incarcerated youth face unique challenges in that they are still developing cognitively, physically, emotionally, and intellectually. They are exploring their own identities, and how they relate to their peers. When the first juvenile court was established in 1899 in Chicago, there was a strict distinction between juvenile misconduct and criminal offenses. In the 1980s these boundaries changed as more youth were sent to criminal courts. Consequently, approaches to youth who are accused of breaking the law have been harsh, with a much stronger emphasis on a punitive response to criminal offenses than rehabilitative. Although youths’ needs differ greatly from adults, in forty-five states judges have the discretion to determine whether an adolescent should be tried as an adult. Twenty-nine states require a youth’s case to be tried in an adult court depending on the age of the youth, the type of crime, or both.³ As a result, youth have been pushed into the adult systems, rather than participating in positive youth development programming.⁴

The rate of youth incarcerated in the United States is approximately 336 per 100,000, compared to 46.8 in England/Wales.⁵ Furthermore, the United States and Somalia are the only two countries in the world that have not ratified the Convention of the Rights of the Child.⁶ The United Nations General Assembly adopted this resolution on November 20, 1989, to protect children’s political, civil, cultural, economic, and social rights.

Research indicates youth in detention facilities have more difficulties, such as suicide attempts, mental health problems, and higher rates of physical injury, than those treated within the communities. Furthermore, females in custody report twice the rate of past physical abuse and suicide attempts, and four times the rate of prior sex abuse than males.⁷ Rearrest rates are around 55 percent for youth and as high as 75 percent for youth in urban areas.⁸ Clearly, a punitive system appears not to meet the needs of delinquent youth.

Researchers have investigated the processes and outcomes of artistic self-expression for people who are incarcerated. Laya Silber directed a choir...