ISRCTN22518605.

Whilst most research into music therapy with offenders focuses on music interventions in forensic mental health settings, less research exists into affordances of supporting musicking as an everyday practice in prisons. This article explores the prison as a music scene supported by a music therapist, showing how musicking forms an important part of the prison's emotional geography. Through the presentation of findings from an ethnographic study of musical life in a low secure prison in Norway, the article shows how prisoners engage in music as a technology of self, affording the performance of caring and autonomous identities. We argue that supporting everyday musicking in the prison through music therapy fosters a therapeutic music scene, and that drawing on music as data in criminological research can contribute to more nuanced understandings of prisons.

For most interventions to reduce criminal recidivism, long-term effects are uncertain. Music therapy has shown effects on possible precursors of recidivism, but direct evidence on long-term effects is lacking. In an exploratory parallel randomized controlled trial, 66 inmates in a Norwegian prison were allocated to music therapy or standard care and followed up over a median of 6 years, using state registry data. Median time to relapse was 5 years, with no differences between the interventions. The imprisonment of most participants was too short to provide a sufficient number of therapy sessions. Sufficiently powered studies are needed to examine the long-term effects of appropriate doses of therapy.

Despite the strong relationships evidenced between music and identity little research exists into the significance of music in prisoners’ shifting sense of identity. This article explores musicking as part of the ongoing identity work of prisoners in light of theory on musical performance, narrative and desistance and discusses implications for penal practice and research. Through the presentation of an ethnographic study of music therapy in a low security Norwegian prison we show how participation in music activities afforded congruence between the past, the present and the projected future for participants by way of their unfolding musical life stories. Complementing existing conceptualisations of music as an agent for change, our study suggests that musicking afforded the maintenance of a coherent sense of self for participating prison inmates, whilst offering opportunities for noncoercive personal development. We argue that research into musicking in prison offers fruitful ways of tracing how the complexities inherent in processes of change are enacted in everyday prison life, and that it can advance our knowledge of relationships between culture, penal practice and desistance.