Our Mission
Inspired by the work of abolitionist leaders such as Dr. Angela Davis, Dr. Cornel West, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, as well as the rise of organizations such as The Bail Project and the Marshall Project, Sound Off: Music for Bail seeks to break the silence around the prison-industrial complex (the PIC, for short) with an unexpected weapon: Western classical music.
But why?
Prisons, Policing, and History
The United States imprisons more people per capita than any other country in the world, to the tune of 698 prisoners for every 100,000 people in 2020. The current state of prisons and policing in the United States is rooted in several key elements, but all of these reach back to institutions originating hundreds of years ago. A term often cited in scholarship about these structures of imprisonment, the government organizations that manage them, and companies that profit from this is the prison-industrial complex (PIC).
Sound Off: Music for Bail identifies two specific roots of institutionalized racism and classism that preceded the current state of policing and imprisonment in the United States: Southern slave patrols and Northern strike-breaking. Without awareness of what oppression looked like in prior iterations of systems of punishment and justice, it is unlikely that any attempt to reform the PIC will be able to do anything but recreate its conditions.
The Year 1619
Enslaved people were first stolen from the African continent by the Portuguese and British in 1619 and brought to Point Comfort, Virginia to be bought and sold. From that point in history, chattel slavery was embedded as a pivotal institution in the colonies that would later become the United States, to the point that a civil war would eventually break out in an attempt to preserve it.
Slaveowners and governmental bodies alike reaped economic and political benefits from enslavement, going so far as to create slave patrols as early as 1709 to catch individuals attempting to escape slavery in Southern states. These slave patrols persisted after the Civil War and the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming part of the police forces that would enforce Jim Crow laws for decades afterwards.
Imprisonment As Reform
Just as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade brought African enslaved people’s labor to the British colonies, so too did British views on crime and punishment bring convict labor from home to the New World. Many of the first English “settlers” in the US were sent there as a form of punishment; after 1776, Australia would follow. Prisons as we know them today did not exist until late in the 18th century — previously, individuals deemed guilty by a court would be held temporarily in jails or prisons until whatever punishment (a fine, corporal, or capital punishment) was to be meted out.
It was only after decades of protesting harsh conditions within these institutions that the 1823 Gaols Act was passed: prisons were no longer places to hold people before punishment, but instead were places meant to reform their occupants through isolation, hard work, and reflections upon the Bible. Occupants were subject to laws of silence and backbreaking labor. After realizing the inability of the prison to produce the kind of moral reform that was expected of convicts, the prison system, with its removal of rights, freedoms, and social dignity, shifted to becoming the punishment itself, landing us squarely in the 21st century.
The Shifting Concept of the Prison Industrial Complex
Dr. Angela Davis discusses the idea of the PIC as an organizing tool in this episode of Breaking Down the Prison Industrial Complex, a video initiative of Critical Resistance.
How American Slavery Helped Create Modern-Day Policing
Felice León goes into detail on this episode of Unpack This, a video series hosted by The Root.
But if imprisonment was a reform over corporal punishment, what is the issue?
Imprisonment Doesn’t Reform People
Whether seen through the lens of a therapeutic measure or as a form of punishment, incarceration has failed to produce the results promised. Higher incarceration rates across the country have not produced lower crime rates on their own merit, and in many cases increase criminal activity. Reducing incarceration in many states is linked directly to lower crime rates. And the supposed objective of rehabilitation or at least deterring future crime is unsuccessful, as can be seen in sky-high recidivism and prison re-entry rates. How can this be so?
The practice of locking people up has been known for many years to physically and psychologically damage prisoners, creating comorbidities that bar attempts at re-entering public life. Disenfranchisement of people from workplaces, families, and communities is proven to not only create conditions for former prisoners that increase crime, such as homelessness, joblessness, and social isolation, but also damages the lives of their families, community members, and even people they may not even know.
Racism At All Levels of the PIC
Racism in policing is well-documented on both an individual and institutional level. Its effects stretch far deeper, however, encompassing systems that often escape notice.
The courtroom itself remains a place with abounding unconscious bias and conscious racism, with reports of ongoing systemic racism rampant within the juvenile court system, court officers, sheriff’s departments, judges, the jury selection process, and sentencing.
Beyond the traditional notion of police departments and imprisonment, the US prison-industrial complex also encapsulates the work of governmental agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). Not only are individual officers often found espousing racist beliefs publicly, the tools at ICE and CBP’s disposal are often wielded with particular vitriol towards individuals of African descent, Latinx descent, and Southeast Asian descent.
And despite claims of “model minority” status, disaggregated data from Asian/Pacific Islander populations show that ethnic groups that experience high levels of poverty and unemployment in the US such as the Hmong, Samoan, Tongan, native Hawaiian, Vietnamese, and Filipinx people do experience similarly high levels of criminalization.
Jails Don’t Address the Root Cause
In study after study around the world, the existence of crime is linked to poverty and an inability to meet one’s needs. Simultaneously, in the US, upwards of $220,000,000,000 (that is, 220 billion dollars) is spent on policing and imprisonment. No other country in the world spends more, and no other country such a large percentage of its budget on “safety” without extenuating circumstances of a civil war or coup d’état. In every state in a country with underfunded public schools, more money is spent to incarcerate an individual than on a K-12 student.
Even organizations devoted to furthering policing have admitted massive cost overruns, questioning if “a more nimble and diverse labor force, full of crime scene specialists, social workers, victim advocates and crime-reduction experts" might be both more effective and cheaper than current paradigms. Analysts, activists, and ordinary people alike have joined in targeting the prison-industrial complex as a whole as an institution that not only is ineffective in reducing harm to society, but also drains funds away from initiatives that are proven to both diminish crime and increase the standard of living. The PIC creates the conditions for the societal needs it is imagined to fulfill; until it is abolished, it will continue to create criminality.
“Just as we hear calls today for more humane policing, people then called for a more humane slavery.”
— Dr. Angela Davis
Interview on WKCR
Sound Off: Music for Bail head Jay Julio speaks with WKCR Classical host Simon Cohen about the work of Sound Off.
What does Western classical music have anything to do with this?
Western classical music, being literally built upon class and race distinctions, has served as one of the wrecking balls of a certain line of rhetoric that proposes that, since no other culture than that of Western Europe has been so far capable of creating large-scale works of such grandeur and complexity that they require an entire life’s worth of specific Western training to perform and appreciate, high Western European culture, with its trappings of race superiority and a sneering approach to the poor should dominate, in a sort of ode to the common social Darwinism of the 1900s.
It has also served as part of another, more insidious and common line of thinking, in that Western classical music is a universal experience, and on its own, can serve to change hearts and minds to promote peace, love, and equality. Again, this flies counter in the face of the facts. Several of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s patrons supported him through profits earned in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Dutch slavers bought and sold Southeast Asian orchestral musicians as chattel, and Georg Friedrich Handel, beloved composer of the “Hallelujah Chorus” that is a mainstay of Christmas and Easter services, wrote it at the same time that he was invested in the slave trade himself.
Countless writers of color have written for years at great length about reorienting Western classical music away from an actively racist or quietly racist framework, and in the face of disinterest until late from white arts organizations, some have called for divesting from the world of Western classical music altogether. With all this information at our fingertips, Sound Off considers two additional points.
Pedagogy
With a few exceptions, most musical training in the US is built on Western classical music paradigms of orchestras, bands, and choruses. By working alongside individual teachers, educational programs, and allied organizations that are dedicated to equitable teaching, we can supplement offerings from public schools both musically and contextually, allowing students to not only learn, but question. In addition, arts work allows us to share ideas in ways that words sometimes cannot; while we do not believe that Western classical music is a magic bullet for communication, every kind of music is an individual’s sonic expression of culture, and joining together to listen from, learn from, and teach one another is crucial for us to break beyond systems of class and race oppression.
Who makes up Western classical music today?
To be frank, Western classical music as practiced in the United States is dependent on the buy-in of people of color.
We make up a majority of students in all major conservatories, have pluralities in most major symphony orchestras, are crucial to grant funding for most arts organizations, and work in our communities to educate the next generation of performers, which, by all accounts, will be even more Black and brown than this one.
We are not outsiders in a community we create.
“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”
— Toni Cade Bambara
In Closing
Activist and visionary Mariame Kaba writes, in this seminal interview on NPR alongside rapper Noname:
“I think [coming to the idea of abolition] was a process, not a moment — I didn't wake up and come to the realization. It was through a process of study — a process of experience and seeing how these systems were crushing communities, crushing people.
I remember this one moment I was talking to someone, many many years ago, and they said to me, ‘Why do you assume that prisons are a natural thing?’ And I really didn't understand it. And they're like, ‘Prisons are unnatural — somebody made them, and everything that's made can be unmade.’
… PIC abolition is about imagining a new way. And as Ruthie Gilmore says all the time, abolition is about making things as much as it is about dismantling.”
Here at Sound Off, we are unmaking the old, imagining the new, and creating the future of music. We hope you’ll join us in this vision.