SACRAMENTO, CA – The California Arts Council (CAC) announced its latest round of contracts to new and existing Arts in Corrections (AIC) Coordinating Organizations offering rehabilitative services to incarcerated individuals in California state prisons. The awards come in response to the most recent request for proposals, highlighting the program’s objective to promote health and well-being and address the needs and priorities of California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) institutions. These awards allow the California Arts Council to contract with new, current, and returning Coordinating Organizations to provide AIC programming that promotes healing and well-being through creativity to replace expiring contracts.
The California Arts Council has awarded $1,288,894 in contracts that will span 14 months between September 2023 and October 2024. A total of nine organizations were selected to receive funding awards. One of the nine organizations, Jail Guitar Doors is a new Arts in Corrections provider. Organizations of all sizes were encouraged to submit programming proposals for up to $110,000 that broaden the arts and cultural disciplines of institution workshops.
“The Arts in Corrections program is deeply tied to CAC’s knowledge that the arts catalyze change, transformation and growth for people experiencing incarceration,” said Jonathan Moscone, Executive Director of the California Arts Council. “This current round of awards will fill the demand at each of the state’s 34 correctional institutions and will help expand the program to two more institutions that currently lack state funded AIC programming: San Quentin and the California Health Care Facility.”
“CDCR is proud to expand access to arts programming in its institutions,” said CDCR Secretary Jeff Macomber. “CDCR is implementing the California Model, a commitment to building safer communities through rehabilitation, education, and restorative justice. AIC programming supports that mission by providing a creative outlet to process trauma, learn a new skill, and engage in positive activities while learning from professional artists.”
Administered by the California Arts Council, Arts in Corrections programs are designed to prepare individuals experiencing incarceration for success upon release, enhance rehabilitative goals, and improve the safety and environment of state prisons. The program is internationally recognized for its high-impact, innovative approach to addressing the state’s public safety needs and rehabilitative priorities through the arts.
Arts in Corrections 2023 Contract Awardees
*Indicates new arts programming.
Alliance for California Traditional Arts
Founded in 1997, the Alliance for California Traditional Arts (ACTA) promotes and supports ways for cultural traditions to thrive now and into the future by providing programs and services supporting the state’s diverse living cultural heritage. Their partnering artists are tradition-bearers, sustaining expressions reflective of their community’s shared values, life experiences, and collective wisdom. Through these community-based traditions, practitioners have mobilized and become catalysts for the transformative and restorative value of arts in society. Their tradition-centered infrastructure helps sustain cultural expressions of California’s often underserved folk and traditional arts field.
Healing Rhythms
The organization was co-founded by Director Lacey Williams, a former CDCR employee 2008-2018. Passionate and dedicated to serving incarcerated people. In 2013, Williams and Maestro Abdoul founded Healing Rhythms on a grassroots level performing and facilitating traditional West African Drum experiences for diverse populations, statewide. In 2017, Williams and Maestro Abdoul collaborated with Dr. Renford Reese of Cal Poly to provide a 6-week drumming workshop with the Prison Education Project at Calipatria Prison which was successful and well received. In 2018, Williams and Maestro Abdoul facilitated a drum workshop at San Quentin Prison for Mental Health Awareness week at the request of former Chief of Mental Health Dr Sharon McGarver. They were featured in the San Quentin Newspaper and notable attendees included world renowned Podcaster Earlonne Woods. Since 2019, Maestro Abdoul and teaching artist Jon Martin of Healing Rhythms facilitated drumming workshops at Calipatria Prison and Centinela Prison where all people were welcomed no matter their race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, identity, ability, sexual preference, religion, or language spoken.
Jail Guitar Doors*
Founded in 2009 Jail Guitar Doors provides holistic, trauma-informed, music programs to people experiencing incarceration. Jail Guitar Doors serves three California state prison institutions, with three more paused in August 2022 due to the end of grant funding. The organization has programs in four juvenile camps in Los Angeles, one youth reentry home with the Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC), and one foster home program. The organization also has programs in Texas, New York, and Florida. The Michigan Chapter provided services in Detroit until the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior musical training is not required for participants and programs are open to all races, denominations, genders, and sexual orientations.
Marin Shakespeare Company
Since 2003, Marin Shakespeare Company has provided rich, relevant, trauma-informed and healing-centered programming in up to 14 CDCR institutions. The organization also has provided leadership and training to its AIC peers. Its Drama Therapy-inspired curriculum combined with exploring Shakespeare’s texts are powerful tools for people to examine shared humanity, practice self-reflection and self-expression, build healing communities, and explore living a more pro-social, positive life. Shakespeare’s texts also contain implicit bias and the organization offers a way to recognize and learn from these aspects of Shakespeare’s works, while encouraging diverse perspectives on the texts, to deepen understanding of the multiplicity of human experience.
Muckenthaler Cultural Center
The Muckenthaler Culural Center has been providing rehabilitative arts programming for the CAC Arts in Corrections program at 11 CA state prisons throughout the past 10 years. They have also provided STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) classes designed to teach career and portfolio skills to improve chances of acquiring higher education and higher paying jobs for young women who are impacted by the juvenile justice system. Since 2017, through the CAC Reentry Through the Arts grant, they have also been providing storytelling, hip hop dance, and visual arts classes for formerly incarcerated adults. Their Teaching Artists focus our students’ attention on learning new artistic skills. Their students eventually are able to address past traumas through the creative process. The teachers provide arts programming that are rehabilitative and transformative, resulting in a constructive means of self-expression, improved self-discipline, critical thinking skills, and improved relationships and communication with family, friends and staff.
Red Ladder Theatre Company
Red Ladder Theatre Company has a 31-year history of serving adults and youth experiencing incarceration by utilizing the transformational power of creativity to promote trauma resiliency, empower participants, build collaboration, support community, amplify voices, and change narratives to improve opportunities. Red Ladder Theatre center all communities that are impacted by systems of incarceration, including system-engaged/system-impacted/at promise youth, currently incarcerated individuals, returned residents, and their families, friends, and community. The programming is collectively influenced by these connected communities in design, delivery, and staffing.
William James Association
Acting on the conviction that hands-on arts engagement enriches, heals, and unites communities, WJA has brought exceptional artists into prisons throughout California and other states since 1977. WJA’s Prison Arts Project is centered around transformative arts experiences in nontraditional settings, serving men and women and youth. WJA’s Poetic Justice Project collaborates with individuals reentering communities. The organization believes in the power of arts participation as an effective instrument for healing, community integration, institutional and social change. The teaching artists are passionate about and inspired by social justice issues.
Women Wonder Writers
For over a decade, Women Wonder Writers (WWW) has provided culturally relevant prevention, intervention, and rehabilitation for those impacted by and at severe risk of impaction by the criminal justice system, including the most vulnerable. This includes art-based and therapeutic services to youths, juvenile halls, the courts, and adults in prison, probationary, and community settings throughout Southern California. WWW has been providing services to several institutions such as CAC, CVSP, ISP and more, in southern California through the California Arts Council Arts in Corrections program since 2019. The Write of Your L!fe (TWOYL) is a 12-week restorative justice program using the arts led by trauma-trained instructors who curate a social-emotional learning curriculum. TWOYL serves as an introduction to the fundamentals of literary, visual, and performing arts, through culturally competent social-emotional learning. It also includes multidisciplinary components built into it. Most importantly, healing is the center part of our program. Trust begins with sincere efforts to help each and every student regardless of background, using art as a medium of self-exploration on serious and difficult topics for deep-level change.
About Arts in Corrections
Arts in Corrections is a partnership between the CAC and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) designed to have a positive impact on the social and emotional well-being of people experiencing incarceration, promoting healing and interpersonal transformation both inside and outside of the boundaries of their institutions.
The program upholds the following values:
- People experiencing incarceration are deserving of dignity and respect.
- Policies should dismantle the root causes of incarceration.
- Community-based interventions reduce harm and make communities safer by replacing state-sanctioned systems of retribution and punishment.
- Individual and collective accountability for harm, and the healing of trauma, can create a more safe and just society for all.
California’s Arts in Corrections program is made possible by funding from the Division of Rehabilitative Programs at CDCR. Services provided span the full spectrum of art disciplines, with organizations offering instruction in visual; literary; media; performing; and cultural, folk, and traditional arts.
Since the program’s re-launch in the 2013-14 fiscal year, CDCR’s investment has increased from $2.5 million in the first two years to an $8 million annual commitment. As of June 2017, arts programming is provided at all 35 state adult correctional facilities.
For more information about the program, including a list of all current Coordinating Organizations, visit the California Arts in Corrections website.
Media Inquiries Only:
Kimberly Brown
Public Affairs Specialist
kimberly.brown@arts.ca.gov
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The California Arts Council is a state agency with a mission of strengthening arts, culture, and creative expression as the tools to cultivate a better California for all. It supports local arts infrastructure and programming statewide through grants, initiatives, and services. The California Arts Council envisions a California where all people flourish with universal access to and participation in the arts.
Members of the California Arts Council include: Consuelo Montoya, Chair; Vicki Estrada, Vice Chair; Gerald Clarke; Caleb Duarte; Ellen Gavin; Leah Goodwin; Alex Israel; Phil Mercado; Roxanne Messina Captor; Nicola Miner; and Olivia Raynor. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov.
The California Arts Council is committed to increasing the accessibility of its online content. For language and accessibility assistance, visit https://arts.ca.gov/about/about-us/language-communications-assistance. To read this announcement in Spanish, please use the website’s Google Translate tool by clicking the “Translate” link in the upper righthand corner of this page.
El Consejo de las Artes de California se compromete a aumentar la accesibilidad de sus contenidos en línea. Para obtener ayuda con el idioma y la accesibilidad, visite https://arts.ca.gov/about/about-us/language-communications-assistance. Para leer este anuncio en español, utilice la herramienta Google Translate del sitio web haciendo clic en el enlace “Traducir” situado en la esquina superior derecha de esta página.
