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‘Helping people survive’: how creating a hip-hop album supported incarcerated artists

Formerly or currently imprisoned artists in Florida came together to create an inspiring album, much of which was recorded under difficult circumstances

While Morse noted that the album’s sound quality was impaired by technical limitations, Bending the Bars is polished and clear, an accomplishment owed partly to its production and mostly to the ingenuity of its artists: singers, rappers and collaborators like J4, dangeRush and Chuckie Lee, all of whom alchemized the tracklist into a textural tapestry: playful, mournful, educational and intentionally dotted with prerecorded interjections from the prison phone line (“you have one minute remaining”). Field, whose song Tearing Down Walls and Building Bridges closes the album, studied theology at Columbia University and received his master’s from Gulf Coast Bible College, and has contributed 2,000 pages of writing to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology civic media project Between the Bars. After our call, which was cut off due to time restrictions, Field sent an email describing the prison-industrial complex as “an insidious and intentional campaign” that, he warned, is an ongoing harbinger of societal abuse, regardless of a person’s criminal background.

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