Program Opportunities

21. October 2009 by Rev Young.

Juvenile Justice Advocates, Criminal Reform Advocates and Prison reform Advocates all agree on one thing……we need programs.  It doesn’t matter to us if they are programs for juveniles in conflict with the law, juveniles who are incarcerated, adults in our prison facilities, inmates being released from prison or those sentenced to community corrections……we need programs. 

We have neglected the opportunity and responsibility we have to reform, re-educate and transition those in conflict with the law from a place of conflict to a place of productivity.  We have missed a very important step in the process of crime and punishment.  We have stopped the process with punishment.  We have forgotten that at some point we are going to have to help these people pass the place of penance and onto the next season of their lives.  The next portion of their lives where they can contribute and participate in our communities.

We have many who have brought scattered programs into facilities.  Some of these programs are aimed at education, some are programs to end addiction, some are vocational and some are spiritual.  What we need is an across the board transformation for our penal system and realize that we cannot punish people for their entire lives without a severe and extraordinary cost…….to all of us.

I want to encourage all who have skills or talents to begin thinking of ways to put those skills to work in the form of transformational programs.  We know that the government cannot and will not do this for us.  We have the capability the knowledge and we have the resources available to us at a significantly lower price tag than the government would put on these services.

Some of these programs can change the attitude and outlook of inmates, others will give them skills sets and still others will help to further their education so that they can function in our society. 

Let me give you an example of an ordinary enjoyment that we can tune in to everyday.  Music is probably one of our favorite pass times and enjoyments that we have in our lives.  We can have music fill our space with the flip of a switch.  We also know the ability of music to change the atmosphere around us and even help us to escape for a brief time from the concerns around us.  Music has an uncanny ability to sooth, heal, perform grief therapy, help us fall in love and help us to make it through difficult circumstance.  I have witnessed the effects of music on autistic children and seen the calming effect in my own autistic daughter.  From the time my daughter was very young, music had the ability to sooth her when nothing else could.  It also helped her to learn and adapt to the overstimulating world she lived in. 

It seems that this is true in prisons also.  The article, from Prison Fellowship Ministries, gives testimony to the transformational power of music…..something we take for granted.  Prison facilities do not have piped in music, they do not come with stereo systems and they do not have access to mp3 players or ipods.  An environment void of music.  I cannot imagine.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

Since the 1920s, when wardens whipped out band tunes to quell skirmishes in chow halls, music has played its way through barbed wire fences and into many a lonely prison cell. It found its way to the fingers of Jewish women in an orchestra at

 Music speaks to every human emotion. It rouses the inklings of love, soothes agitated spirits, and plays the companion to the suffering soul. As the American jazz composer Michael Torke put it, “Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?”

In the world of corrections, psychotherapy and music often converge, as many corrections experts discover music to be a helpful tool in rehabilitation. Others argue that using the arts to treat prisoners is little more than decorating a swamp with flowers. But when the double bar line has descended upon Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” there are few who can dispute that music has power, even in a world of concrete and gray.

Click on the link below and then read the attached article. Then give some thought to ways you could change their environment….or someone’s life.

http://www.prisonfellowship.org/inside-out/september-2009/12518-serenading-the-beast

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