The Role of Music-Making in Carceral Environments in England and Wales

Abstract

This thesis looks to investigate the role of music-making in prisons in England and Wales. It investigates within which prisons music-making is available, the styles and genres that are provided, music-making’s utility (or lack thereof) to carceral infrastructures, and where it may provide potential resistance to carcerality. Music-making (Cohen and Duncan, 2022) draws from the concept of musicking coined by (Small, 1998) and uses music as a verb, suggesting that music is never purely an aesthetic but always bound in the socialities that surround and create it (Cohen, 2000). The core arguments of the thesis are that in order to gain access to prisons, music-making providers have adjusted their aims to fulfil a blend of medical and opportunity models where criminal behaviour is believed to be a pathology that can only be fixed by providing opportunities for the ‘criminal’ to change themselves (Kendall, 2000). The aims of reducing re-offending by creating an identity change (known as secondary desistance (Anderson et al., 2011, Maruna and Farrall, 2004)) through group music-making come to the forefront as they chase funding bids, access to prison, fiscal contributions from carceral institutions, and a space within which to practise. Yet the empirical sections of this thesis open up the omnidirectional affects of group music-making activities – the ways in which the participants are being as affective as they are affected (Anderson, 2009, Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, Massumi, 1995). The participants and facilitators show that music-making is used to create an ‘affective abolition’ of the pains of imprisonment (Crewe, 2011) as a way of managing the carceral environment. This, coupled with the facilitators’ own experience of carceral pains, has created a desire for prison-based music-making organisations to value the voices of those with lived experience and let them direct organisational practices more and more. This is leading to a desire for advocacy and a focus on not only creating opportunities for participants to change themselves, but also to change the situations, structures, and systems that have caused their incarceration in the first place.