Creative Rehabilitation

Programs in California prisons include training in creative arts, with a rehabilitative purpose. Erin Harrington of City on a Hill Press writes of Kenny Hill, who for many years taught guitar making to prisoners:

“It makes the environment more humane,” Hill said of arts rehabilitation programs. “It gives the participants something to focus on.”

The course is a part of the Arts in Corrections Program (ACP), a rehabilitative art program instituted in each of the 32 California state prisons. Santa Cruz jails also hold art workshops similar to the Arts in Corrections program, with the purpose of providing a venue for dialogue and creative development.

Research shows that the ACP has been beneficial to prisoners. According to a study conducted by San Jose State Professor Lawrence Brewster, the ACP has had a drastic impact. His findings showed that for prisoners who were involved in the program, there was a 75 percent reduction in disciplinary write-ups (based on a period from the three months before a person is imprisoned to the three months after leaving the prison). As well as a decrease in write-ups, 63 percent of prisoners in the program were less likely to re-offend after two years than the average inmate.
According to Hill, it is essential that the rehabilitation programs continue to exist, even if solely to keep the prison environment stable for inmates and employees.
“Although the idea of prison is to make your life miserable for the time you’re in prison, it actually makes prison a more functional environment for everybody,” Hill
explained. “Prison is a world unto itself. One of the things that I think people on the outside don’t understand is that that world needs to function fairly smoothly.”

Despite proven rehabilitative qualities, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) decided that, because of a lack of funding, the ACP simply had to be cut. Along with arts programs in Santa Cruz jails, the ACP now has to rely entirely on outside funding in order to keep creativity and expression alive within prison walls.