Video courtesy of Kansas City Star
Why incarcerated persons? Why not the elderly, or veterans, or children at a community center? Why bring arts to the incarcerated?
There are almost 10,000 incarcerated persons in Kansas. It costs $26,407 per inmate per year to house our incarcerated. Kansas has a recidivism rate of 35%. Returning folks to prison can cost the state $92,424,500 each year.
Arts in Prison impacts the likelihood that an inmate will be successful upon return to community. The arts are uniquely able to reach those hiding deep within themselves. Practicing art puts one in touch with their better self. Arts provide an opportunity for reflection. The arts create opportunities for empathy, collaboration, and accountability. Arts in Prison creates success opportunities for inmates. Success, combined with confidence, grows hope. And with hope, anything becomes possible.
Support Us
Arts in Prison is funded by individual donations and foundation grants. When you donate to Arts in Prison you make change possible. Your gift helps to provide supplies and opportunities to the incarcerated men and women we serve. You make the difference that provides hope and belief in a positive, pro-social future.
Programs offered
Performing arts
From Living Shakespeare to contemporary scenes and original works Arts in Prison’s inmate actors know no bounds when it comes to interpreting characters and landing spot on performances. What better way to know yourself than to get into a character’s psyche.
Visual arts
Painting, drawing, and mixed media classes are offered. Knitting and crochet create opportunities for inmates to give back making baby bonnets and booties for hospitalized babies and hats and scarves for the homeless. Inmates do needlepoint, paper mache and more. Photography asks you to find beauty in the place you have been sentenced to exist. Creating something beautiful becomes a way of giving back, of saving yourself and of offering value to your loved ones.
Writing
Poetry, Creative Writing, Memoir Writing, Short Stories - these are written and disected in Arts in Prison’s writing classes. Well known poems, contemporary shorts and original works teach important life lessons.
Communication arts
How do you tell your story? How do you stand up and own your past while imagining your future? Creating your future requires all of the art skills and all of the grace you have learned and shared in Arts in Prison programs. Now is the time to put what you have learned into action as you prepare for job interviews and other ways on engaging in the community at large.
Yoga
“How can a yoga class prepare me to be released from prison?” In so may ways! Yogis use different muscles than the ones they are used to flexing. They humble themselves to learn, they support each other when things go well, and when they don’t . Mindfulness, flexibility, relief from stress, anxiety and depression. Learning that you are enough.
choir
The East Hill Singers, subject of the documentary Conducing Hope, is a mens choir in the minimum security unit of Lansing Correctional Facility in Lansing Kansas. Singers from the prison are joined by tenors, baritones and bases from the community. This choir performs four times a year outside of the walls. Hosted by local churches inmate singers and their families celebrate their hard work and successes together.
The Heart to Heart choir at the Topeka Correctional Facility creates opportunities for the women housed there to learn more about music, how to listen to it and how to perform it. The choir has performed inside of th facility to invited audiences.
“The primary benefit of practising any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one’s soul to grow.”