In Locked Down, a track by the San Diego-based poet and rapper, Likelihood, she sings with each foreboding and care: “Day by day that you just get up you’re blessed / love each breath, ’trigger you don’t know what’s subsequent.” Likelihood wrote the track – initially a poem, its title a callback to Akon’s Locked Up – whereas imprisoned in Phoenix, Arizona, throughout the starting of the Covid pandemic and subsequent lockdown (“six toes aside in a five-by-five,” she raps in the identical track, alluding to the digital impossibility of social distancing within the American jail system). It’s a part of Likelihood’s self-published assortment of brief tales and poems, entitled Pandemic Soup for the Soul, a mirrored image on “what we skilled throughout the pandemic disaster”, she shared with me in a latest cellphone name. “It’s loopy how they maintained management and instilled concern inside us. Once you’re locked up, you ask your self … are you going to be offended, or are you going to seek out what your calling and function is?”
Locked Down can also be one among 16 tracks on Bending the Bars, a hip-hop album that includes unique songs by artists previously or at present incarcerated in Florida’s Broward county jails (aside from Likelihood, a Florida native). Bending the Bars was organized by the south Florida abolitionist group Chip – the Group Hotline for Incarcerated Folks – which was initially based to help inmates throughout the early days of Covid. Nicole Morse, a Chip co-founder and affiliate professor on the College of Maryland, says the group started fielding calls in April 2020, primarily from Broward, the county simply north of Miami-Dade; the calls have been primarily about medical neglect, abuse and an environment of abject concern, perpetuated by guards who demanded silence.
It’s no secret that the prison-industrial advanced is inherently abusive, particularly Florida’s, which has one of many highest incarceration charges per capita. As Morse defined in an interview, “Most jails and prisons have a component of violence, retaliation, coercion – it’s what the system depends on to manage folks.” And Broward county is uniquely punitive: “Broward county jails are standouts in how lawless they appear to be, how a lot the corrections officers are licensed to behave with none oversight.” Final yr, it was reported that 21 inmates had died in Broward jails since 2021, prompting the NAACP to declare the necessity for an investigation. In 2021, the information Chip had gathered was used to help a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and Incapacity Rights Florida on behalf of people affected by Covid within the Broward county jail.
One thing extra hopeful was rising from these hotline calls, too: creativity. “Folks needed to share their newest poetry or a track they have been growing,” Morse mentioned. “Artwork was serving to folks survive an extremely determined time.” Noam Brown, a kids’s musician and Chip committee member, started dreaming up the concept of an album; Morse, whose analysis seems to be at LGBTQ+ cultural manufacturing, notably collaborative media manufacturing with incarcerated artists, co-signed the venture. They needed to do greater than merely increase consciousness. “Once you have a look at how elevating consciousness features politically, people who find themselves not impacted by the system are inclined to get overwhelmed and apathetic, as a result of the system is so violent,” Morse mentioned. As an alternative, Chip hoped to create a platform for the wealth of expertise they regularly encountered. The group started fundraising, making use of for grants and placing the phrase out that they have been producing an album; Gary Subject, an incarcerated organizer, author and scholar, turned the manager producer, serving to to attach the artists with Chip.
Musicians on the within used two telephones to report their songs – one because the microphone to report their vocals, the opposite to take heed to the beat. “The challenges have been phenomenal,” Subject shared in a cellphone name. “Folks couldn’t even discuss to their households, by no means thoughts collaborate on one thing as difficult as producing a studio album. We have been in the course of a pandemic. There have been 4 telephones and 40 inmates attempting to make use of them.” Areas with two simply accessible telephones have been restricted; the period of any jail cellphone name is restricted. However Chip lined the prices of the calls, whereas Brown’s brother, Eitan, labored because the sound engineer, and the Grammy-winning kids’s artists Alphabet Rockets helped create beats. Artists who have been already out have been capable of spend time within the studio, together with Likelihood, who returned to south Florida after her launch. After reconnecting with a former classmate, the 2 attended a gathering for Chainless Change, a Lauderhill-based non-profit advocating for these affected by the legal authorized system. “It was divine – I don’t consider in accidents; I knew I used to be being referred to as to return to Florida,” Likelihood mentioned. She started working with the group and helped arrange a poetry occasion, the place she met Subject, Brown and Morse. She requested if they’d room on the album for another.
The result’s almost an hour of uniquely south Floridian hip-hop and R&B, each of that are constellations of so many genres – Caribbean beats, southern bass, Deep Metropolis soul, Miami drill – poetic musings on love, loneliness and hope, and calls for for systemic change to the draconian and brutal situations of the Florida jail system. Whereas Morse famous that the album’s sound high quality was impaired by technical limitations, Bending the Bars is polished and clear, an accomplishment owed partly to its manufacturing and principally to the ingenuity of its artists: singers, rappers and collaborators like J4, dangeRush and Chuckie Lee, all of whom alchemized the tracklist right into a textural tapestry: playful, mournful, instructional and deliberately dotted with prerecorded interjections from the jail cellphone line (“you will have one minute remaining”). Subject, whose track Tearing Down Partitions and Constructing Bridges closes the album, studied theology at Columbia College and acquired his grasp’s from Gulf Coast Bible Faculty, and has contributed 2,000 pages of writing to the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise civic media venture Between the Bars. He is aware of, intimately, the importance of the writing course of. “I bear in mind, as an inmate again in 2010, what a profound sense of gratitude the chance to put in writing gave me,” he shared. “The connection between writing, rap, hip-hop, music, jails, jail – it’s actually intertwined.”
County jails, Subject added, are incubators for hip-hop, particularly in Broward county, which cultivated “legends like Kodak Black and YNW Melly … however the range of voices on Bending the Bars is a pure extension of the eclectic mixture of detainees that may be present in virtually any city jail”. Subject added that house for writing, and a deeper understanding of philosophical ideology, are inevitable on the within. “Whereas on a tutorial degree, philosophy will be damaged down into many classes – ontology, epistemology, ethics, morality – in its easiest sense, philosophy is man’s try to determine the world round him and his place in it,” he mentioned. “When that world is decreased to what lies behind the razor wire, an old-timer who has served 35 years … can present extra knowledge than somebody with a PhD in metaphysics.”
The system typically censored mail or blocked cellphone calls throughout the recording course of; Morse mentioned that this necessitated new pathways for the collaborators to attach with one another. “We needed to develop a set of methods to beat these obstacles,” they mentioned. “The venture was made with out the cooperation of any jail or jail. Each technique we got here up with for tips on how to get by to folks, tips on how to join with them, tips on how to discover them in the event that they appear to have disappeared within the system – we are able to now share these methods with family members of incarcerated people who don’t have any further privileged entry.” It’s because of this that Chip hopes the album will function a mannequin for tactics of interacting with and caring for these contained in the system – and for future inventive endeavors. “Gary all the time says there’s hundreds of jails within the nation, and in each, there are people who’ve as a lot expertise because the folks we linked to,” Morse added. “We did this independently and autonomously. We hope this evokes others.” In 2026, Chip will launch a documentary concerning the course of.
After our name, which was minimize off because of time restrictions, Subject despatched an e mail describing the prison-industrial advanced as “an insidious and intentional marketing campaign” that, he warned, is an ongoing harbinger of societal abuse, no matter an individual’s legal background. “If allowed to proceed unchecked, it won’t be content material with feeding upon the poor, minorities, these affected by substance abuse points and undocumented immigrants. How lengthy till the weaponization of the justice division begins to focus on journalists, educators, scientists, researchers, protesters and even some politicians as enemies of the folks? The time to acknowledge, arrange and converse out is now.” It’s some extent he illustrates in his track: “Nicely, they’ve criminalized psychological sickness and deal with habit as a criminal offense / How lengthy do you suppose this strikes from the shadows to prime time? / … Gained’t you increase your voice / Assist somebody to face up / Silence is a alternative.”
