Excerpted from Arts & America: Arts, Culture, and the Future of America’s Communities. This essay looks at changes in the American prison system and the role that the arts may play in positively impacting those changes over the next 10–15 years. The

"...the work reported here suggests that activities like ensemble music-making may allow youth to discover and act on their strengths. As one choir member admitted, 'I had fear in my heart, but I had to sing through it.' Correspondingly, it is time for cultural oranizations and researchers to match that bravery by developing robust strength-based programs, along with the research designs and measures that will help to articualte if, why, and under what conditions arts recognize, build, and sustain young people's talents and resources" (Palmer Wolf & Holochwost

This report serves as a point of entry into creative placemaking as defined and supported by the Tucson Pima Arts Council’s PLACE Initiative. To assess how and to what degree the PLACE projects were helping to transform communities, TPAC was asked by the Kresge Foundation to undertake a comprehensive evaluation. This involved discussion with stakeholders about support mechanisms, professional development, investment, and impact of the PLACE Initiative in Tucson, Arizona, and the Southwest regionally and the gathering of qualitative and quantitative data to develop indicators and method

This exploratory paper, May the Songs I Have Written Speak for Me: An Exploration of the Potential of Music in Juvenile Justice, sets out to answer the question, “What is the potential of music in the lives of court-involved youth?” Written by WolfBrown in partnership with Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, the paper is a major investigation of the potential of music to make contributions to the lives of young people in juvenile justice settings, building on the current work of many of the institutions committed to these young people.

The arts produced within women's prisons offer a look at creativity from a particular viewpoint that is outside the usual structure of art markets and traditional legitimizing art structures (Peterson 1976, 10-11). Creative work in a nonvoluntary context presents unique delineations, descriptions, and/or transformations of meaning. The personal relations inside the prison institution can be facilitators or inhibitors of creativity for women on the inside.

In 2010, an ambitious model for social change emerged in Chicago that aimed to connect detained youth and those at risk for incarceration (“at-risk youth”1) to rigorous and engaging arts instruction, infused with social and emotional learning goals. Dubbed the Arts Infusion Initiative, the Chicago Community Trust (“the Trust”) spearheaded and funded this five year, $2.5 million demonstration while earning cooperation from the local detention facility, public school system, community policing office, and community arts program leaders to integrate arts programming

This report shares the results of evluation of 12 to 18 week art classes attended by 64 men hel in the Santa Cruz Main Jail, San Francisco County Jail - San Bruno Complex, MCJ Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles, Fresno County Jail and Sacramento County Jail - Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center​.
 

This report presents results from a quantitative evaluation of prison arts education.

This report offers some much needed clarity by piecing together this country’s disparate systems of confinement. The American criminal justice system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 1,852 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories.1 And we go deeper to provide further detail on why people are locked up in all of those different types of facilities.

This report provides a first-of-its-kind detailed view of the 219,000 women incarcerated in the United States, and how they fit into the even larger picture of correctional control. [p.2]