Dead Man Shuffling

If you were going to prison for the next 20+ years and you could only bring 10,000 songs with you, what would they be?

This is a question that federal prison inmates might actually be asking themselves in the very near future. Currently in its trial stages at a West Virginia women’s facility, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons is experimenting with a program that would allow convicts to own MP3 players and select music from a catalog of about one million songs.

The project aims to “help inmates deal with issues such as idleness, stress and boredom associated with incarceration,” according to bureau spokeswoman Traci Billingsley. Inmates will be allowed to purchase the players from prison commissaries and, while they won’t be able to access the internet for obvious reasons, they can add songs from a growing list of tracks deemed “appropriate” by the Record Artists Association of America’s content rating standards. As you can probably assume, this list excludes explicit lyrics and subject matter, including “obscene or racially charged language” and anything that “may disrupt the good and orderly running of the institution” (which is just fine if you’re a convicted felon who listens to exclusively late-1970’s soft rock).

This rather revolutionary approach to bettering prison life is being applauded by many inmates rights advocates, including the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prisons Project, David Fathi. Fathi recognizes the potential for the program to improve prisoner relations by dissipating tension, as well as provide inmates with a tangible connection to the outside world. He attests that music “allows for an important connection (with life on the outside) that assists with their eventual re-entry” into society – something that the US penal system isn’t great at based on our repeat incarceration statistics.

Naturally, there’s always someone who has a problem with everything. In the classic example of treating the symptoms instead of the disease, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, chimed in:

“It’s difficult to see how all of the necessary safeguards can be put into place to stop prisoners from using MP3 players as bargaining chips or other malicious devices…It appears to be a risky endeavor and raises a lot of questions that need to be answered.”

Additionally, national president of the Council of Prison Locals Dale Deshotel claims that many of the council’s members have “concern’s about the program’s operation,” but chose to not elaborate any further on what grounds.

While Grassley and Deshotel both make valid (and by “valid,” I actually mean “totally vague and dismissive”) points, the program is already proving itself positively in its test run, and what’s more is that the program won’t cost taxpayers anything at all, so says Billingsley, which is a pretty novel concept given the way the US justice system currently hemorrhages money (I’m sure any comment here about the War on Drugs would be preaching to the choir).

Though expectedly imperfect, the MP3 player program serves as evidence that perhaps the United States might be following (very distantly) in the footsteps of countries like Norway, who look at incarceration as an opportunity to rehabilitate rather than merely persecute. That, and that music fucking rules.

@sashahecht