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.

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Multilingual approaches to collaborative creativity can be seen as one form of resistance to inequality and neo-colonialism, through the potential to decentre the English language, unsettle entrenched linguistic hierarchies, and open up spaces of linguistic hospitality (Ricoeur, 2006). This article will share a song written in collaboration with displaced young people, in order to reflect on ways in which multilingualism in creative processes and performance might play a role in fostering solidarity and mutual care. The song, the writing process and the participants' reflections together act as a lens through which to observe small but significant shifts that can happen when linguistic repertoires beyond the dominant language are welcomed into a shared creative space. Multilingual approaches here are not seen as a quick-fix solution to systemic injustice, but as one way to illuminate questions of power and audibility in socially-engaged arts practice.