Distant Voices is an ongoing, interdisciplinary collaborative action research project, drawing on criminology, community development, politics, practice-led research and songwriting to explore crime, punishment and reintegration through creative conversations that aim to challenge and unsettle understandings of and approaches to rehabilitation and reintegration. In this paper, we discuss some of the thinking behind the project and we reflect on our experiences to date as a community of enquiry. Specifically, we explore the extent to which certain practices of hospitality that we have experienced in processes of collaborative songwriting and song-sharing might mediate and resist the ‘hostile environment’ that faces people leaving prison in many contemporary societies. Drawing on our experience, we argue that hospitality is often disruptive; that creating and sustaining hospitable environments is extremely challenging; and that to do so requires careful thought and planning, including in relation to problems created by the power dynamics intrinsic to criminal justice. The paper includes links to and discussion of one song written in the project – ‘An Open Door’ -- which engages with and illustrates these themes.

This article analyses findings from the Economic and Social Research Council/Arts and Humanities Research Council (ESRC/AHRC)-funded ‘Distant Voices – Coming Home’ project (ES/POO2536/1), which uses creative methods to explore crime, punishment and reintegration. Focusing on songs co-written in Scottish prisons, we argue that the songs serve to complicate and substantiate our grasp of what state punishment does to people, as well as perhaps affording their prison-based co-writers both moments and modalities of resistance to dominant narratives within criminal justice. In doing so, they creatively express and explore affective and perhaps even unconscious aspects of the self. We argue that our work contributes to a more expansive and considered treatment of narrative in criminology; one that admits and engages with a more diverse and creative range of expressions of experience and selfhood, all of them partial and some of them contradictory. By attending to diverse kinds of narratives embodied in these songs, we learn more about what criminalisation, penalisation and incarceration do to people and to their stories.

This chapter aims to address the scant attention that has been paid to time and temporalities in re-entry and re/integration research. Drawing on data from the ‘Distant Voices—Coming Home’ project, which used creative methods to explore re/integration after punishment—we illustrate and analyse three ‘travails’ of penal time. We use the term travails here to stress the significant, difficult and active work involved in addressing these temporal challenges. Respectively, these travails concern the struggles caused by ‘de-synchrony’ between time inside and outside of prison and the problems of ‘re-synchrony’ that it creates; the contestation of ‘readiness’ for progression and release; and the problem of living with the paradox of ‘enduring temporariness’. In our conclusion, we argue that tackling these three challenges requires people re-entering society to travel not just through spaces and to places but also through time, both backwards and forwards. These journeys are fraught with both difficulty and danger.

In this article, we explore the origins and early development of the ongoing collaborative action research project ‘Distant Voices – Coming Home’. We begin by explaining why and how our somewhat different backgrounds and interests came to be connected in Distant Voices. We then go on to explore the project’s first two development stages. In discussing the first phase (Distant Voices 1), we focus on how and why we developed creative processes and practices as modes of communication, knowledge exchange and public engagement. In discussing the second phase (Distant Voices 2), we reflect upon how and why these practices came to be seen as constitutive of sites of personal and community development and of knowledge generation. In conclusion, we reflect briefly on the challenges of formalising Distant Voices in its current form – as a large-scale, collaborative research project.