How Musicambia Creates Connection Through Music in Prison

November 9, 2026

By Robert Roche, VP of Marketing at The Last Mile.

“In prison, there are few ways in which we can reconnect in our essential humanity with each other.”

Kenyatta Emmanuel knows that from experience. He first encountered Musicambia while incarcerated, participating in a program that brought professional musicians inside to help people create original work. Today, he returns to carceral spaces as a teaching artist, helping other musicians turn memories, relationships, grief, humor, and hope into songs.

That progression says a great deal about what Musicambia has built. Music is the medium, but the process also creates time for people to listen to one another, take creative risks, and discover that what they have to say has value.

For someone entering a workshop, the immediate goal might be writing a song. By the end, that person may be standing in front of a room performing something deeply personal that did not exist days earlier.

Musicambia Began With A Belief In Music And Change

Musicambia Executive Director Shawn Jaeger describes the organization’s purpose simply. “We help people in prison and jail to make music,” he told me. The organization began at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York in 2014 and has since expanded to facilities in several states.

The idea originated a year earlier, when founder Nathan Schram toured prisons in Venezuela and encountered music programs meeting for as many as 30 hours each week. He returned inspired to create something similar in the United States, and the organization’s name grew from that experience: music combined with cambia, the Spanish word for change.

Over the following decade, Musicambia developed several ways to bring that philosophy inside. Some programs run weekly across much of the year, while intensive residencies ask participants and teaching artists to create an entire concert of original music in only five days.

Across those formats, the starting point remains remarkably open. A participant might arrive with a finished song, a fragment of melody, a few lyrics, or simply something inside that he or she needs to express.

Creating Space For Expression Inside Prison

Kenyatta describes prison as an environment where personal expression can become heavily controlled. “In prison, expression is subdued by definition,” he explained, noting that even clothing, names, and other ordinary forms of individuality can become governed by security concerns.

Music creates another route. “There’s really no other context in which one can express” some of these experiences, Kenyatta said, “other than in art, other than in music.”

Those experiences can become deeply personal very quickly. Participants may write about lost relationships, family, addiction, regret, love, or major moments that changed the course of their lives. Teaching artists help translate those ideas into melodies, arrangements, lyrics, and performances without requiring someone to arrive with formal musical training.

Kenyatta believes the time itself carries meaning. As a participant, he noticed that teaching artists repeatedly entered the facility and devoted hours to helping someone else create. “The establishment of the relationship was centered around the fact that they came in and gave their time,” he said.

That investment can open conversations that other environments rarely make possible. Instead of processing a person through a system, Musicambia asks what that person experienced, what remains with them, and how they want to express it.

How Musicambia Builds A Concert In Five Days

One of Musicambia’s most ambitious programs starts with an ambitious proposition. Teaching artists enter a facility, sometimes meeting the group for the first time, and announce that four days later they will perform a concert. Every song will be original, and much of the music does not exist yet.

Shawn saw that skepticism firsthand during programming in multiple facilities, where up to 40 participants gather for the first session. “People are a little suspicious,” he recalled. “They really didn’t know if this was going to work.”

The process begins with community agreements around curiosity, trust, and giving ideas room to develop. From there, the group might choose a broad theme such as transformation, power, or beauty before using free-writing exercises to generate words and ideas.

Soon, someone finds a line that sounds like a hook. Another person hears a rhythm underneath it, while musicians begin adding harmonies and instrumentation around what the group has created.

“In an hour or so, the group has written a song when nothing existed before,” Shawn said. That first creation becomes proof that the larger challenge is possible.

The shift is psychological as much as musical. Shawn described participants beginning to think, “I belong here, and I believe in my potential to do this seemingly impossible thing.”

Taking Music From Inside Into The World

Musicambia’s first album, The Musicambia Songbook, expands that idea beyond the walls where the songs were written. The project draws largely from work created through programs at Sing Sing and Bedford Hills Correctional Facility and spans the organization’s 12-year history.

Some songs were written by people who have returned home. Others belong to musicians who remain incarcerated, with Musicambia teaching artists and alumni recording their compositions in a professional studio outside.

Shawn said the organization wanted to “finally do justice to this music” because concerts inside can be difficult to document at a professional level. The album gives listeners outside a chance to encounter the creativity that Musicambia’s teaching artists have witnessed for years.

Now Listening

The Musicambia Songbook

Listen to original songs created through Musicambia’s programs and performed by the Cambia Collective. This debut album brings voices from inside prison into the world through stories of struggle, resilience, and transformation.

Listen on Bandcamp → Learn More About Musicambia

One of those songs, Pride, has particular meaning for Kenyatta. A previous participant who remains incarcerated wrote it, then entrusted Kenyatta and the other musicians with bringing his words into the world.

“Performing and recording ‘Pride,’ is remarkably humbling,” Kenyatta told me. As a songwriter himself, he understands how vulnerable it can feel to place your work into someone else’s hands.

He also sees a larger purpose in carrying those words beyond prison. “There is medicine in these spaces that we don’t visit,” Kenyatta said. “Unfortunately, we’re missing out as a society.”

What Can Change Between Monday And Friday

The concert at the end of a Musicambia residency gives the week a destination, but Kenyatta believes much of the real change happens while everyone is trying to reach it.

Participants arrive with dramatically different levels of experience. Some have written music for years, while others question whether they belong in the room or have anything worth contributing. Creating something together begins to change that calculation.

Kenyatta described watching people move from wondering whether they have something meaningful to say toward declaring, “Yes, I do, and let’s say it.” The next step requires even more vulnerability: “I’m gonna say it to some other folks.”

By the final performance, their peers can see that development for themselves. The people onstage come from the same housing units, eat in the same spaces, and live under the same restrictions as the audience watching them.

That recognition can make possibility feel transferable. “The person that they are on that Friday or that Saturday’s performance is recognizable to their peers as someone different or evolved,” Kenyatta said, compared with the person who entered the room on Monday.

The concert becomes evidence. Someone took an idea, trusted other people with it, developed it, practiced it, and finally stood before an audience willing to be seen.

Musicambia After Prison

Eventually, the question changes from what music can accomplish inside to what happens when participants return home.

Shawn sees lessons in music that transfer well beyond performance. “You learn how to take a solo, to step forward,” he said. “You learn how to step back and support others.” Collaboration requires communication, listening, confidence, empathy, and knowing when someone else needs room.

Musicambia also provides a more direct bridge for alumni through the Cambia Collective, a band that brings returning participants together with teaching artists. The group has performed throughout the New York area, giving alumni opportunities to continue relationships that began inside.

For Kenyatta, that continuity addresses something easy to overlook in reentry. A person can return home to urgent demands involving employment, housing, family, technology, and rebuilding relationships, while losing one of the communities that helped sustain them through incarceration.

“Music was something that sustained us,” he said. Yet communal music-making rarely happens automatically outside. Someone still has to coordinate musicians, find space, schedule rehearsals, and create reasons for people to gather.

When the Music Follows You Home

Musicambia continues making that investment. For some alumni, music becomes a profession. For others, it remains a source of nourishment alongside careers in completely different fields.

Kenyatta has experienced both sides. He now plays guitar and keyboard, sings, writes songs, and returns inside as a teaching artist. When I asked him to describe himself as a musician, his answer captured something larger about Musicambia’s work.

“I’m a storyteller,” he said. “The other stuff is just storytelling tools.”

For more than a decade, Musicambia has been helping ensure those stories have somewhere to go, and that the people carrying them have someone willing to listen.

---

About Changemaker Spotlight

Changemaker Spotlight is a recurring series from The Last Mile highlighting the people, organizations, and leaders driving meaningful change across the criminal justice system. From advocates and researchers to employers, educators, and those with lived experience, we feature individuals whose work is creating opportunity, restoring dignity, and building a more effective path forward.

Know someone whose story deserves to be shared? We’d love to hear from you. Send your nominations to robert.roche@thelastmile.org with a brief description of their work and why they should be featured in a future Changemaker Spotlight.

---

By Robert Roche, VP of Marketing at The Last Mile.

Want articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to The Last Mile Marker. This is a biweekly newsletter offering in-depth insights, critical updates, and inspiring stories on criminal justice reform and second chances.