Julius Smith is hogging the phones at the Taylor Correctional Institute in Perry, northern Florida. He dials the same number on both phones, making sure he's able to hear clearly on both lines.
One is being used like headphones and he's listening to a beat crackling over the phone line. The other is his microphone, where he records the lines of "Hands Up," a song he wrote while in while in lockdown:
We are not free.
The only thing we're guilty of is pain and poverty.
Smith, who goes by Prince Jooveh, is one of the fifteen incarcerated artists who appear on the new album Bending the Bars. The hip-hop album features sixteen tracks from different artists, most of whom are from Broward County jails.
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The idea was spawned from conversations had on the Community Hotline for Incarcerated People, or CHIP.
The phone line began during the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to document conditions inside of Broward County jails. But as the pandemic waned, the hotline found a new purpose — as a safe space to share.
Noam Brown, one of the founders of CHIP, said that at first people would talk about conditions inside the jail. “But you also are talking about other things," he continued, "and people are sharing their creativity. ‘Hey, I got this new poem I just wrote. Hey, you wanna hear this song? I have this song, I want you to hear it.'"
So Brown, a music teacher, had an idea. “I know a lot of musicians out here," he retells WLRN. "I know some beat makers, I know some producers, why can't we connect the people on the outside with these artists on the inside?”
“You don’t get positive when you're in prison. You get angry, you get mad, you get forceful and everything is just miserable. So to get that good energy... is surreal."Julius Smith, aka Prince Jooveh.
That idea led to more than three years of coordination, recording and re-recording.
Brown reached out to Nikki Morse, a fellow CHIP founder and research professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore Campus. They joined Brown as an executive producer and wrote a grant that funded the album.
But Brown and Morse needed a way to recruit artists, so they called Gary Field. Field was incarcerated at the Broward County main jail at the time and was a frequent caller on the hotline. He was also familiar with the hip-hop scene inside, even if his first impressions were not positive.
“While I'm laying there trying to sleep at one in the morning, and people were banging on the cell doors, beating on their chest and having these rap battles.” he said, “I was just like, 'Will somebody shut them up please?' But then after a while, it began to dawn on me that there was an incredible amount of talent there.”
Field jumped at the opportunity to join the project as an executive producer and began spreading the word to artists inside. Eventually word spread to all four of Broward’s jail facilities, and artists were calling the hotline to leave demos of their songs. Brown took those demos and sent them to producers who were able to pick and choose which artist to work with.
But scheduling calls with incarcerated people presented challenges.
“They were supposed to call at 1:30, but the facility is put on lockdown, and so now that person couldn't call. Now, when are we gonna reconnect? It could be a two-month delay,“ Brown said.
To combat this, the team took advantage when artists were out on probation — and got them into a studio as fast as possible.
“It's so easy to violate probation. You could be five minutes late to your meeting with your officer and then you're back in — it's a violation and you're back in,” said Brown.
But most of the artists recorded their tracks on jail phone lines — the same process as Smith.
Critique of the criminal justice system
The album is truly a collective work. No two tracks are the same.
Brown says that creative freedom was paramount to the project. "They have enough restrictions inside that they don't need for us to give them creative restriction," he said.
Prince Jooveh's "Hands Up" is a scathing critique of the criminal justice system. In it he hits out at his treatment by both police and corrections officers with lyrics like:
Don't offer us your protection
We don't need none of your help
As soon as you see that we're young and black you go reaching down to your belt
That contrasts with Poetic Prophet 4262's spoken word track "Before I Leave this World of Mine," while Chuckie Lee offers up a pop princess moment with "Barbie Rockstar."
The artists and collaborators were paid a stipend of $250 for their songs. CHIP also went through the process of securing copyright in the artists' names and registered them with the American Society of Composers, Artists and Publishers — enabling them to receive royalties. The artists get 60% of the royalties while the other 40% go to CHIP for operations and their music distributor FREER music. All of the artists on the album own their masters. The album is available on all streaming platforms.
“We've just grown too accustomed [to the carceral system] ... And so being able to continue to use this project to have these conversations — music is a great vehicle."Noam Brown.
Brown hopes that the album can be a bridge between the inside and outside.
“Part of telling stories is for people to have a clearer understanding of that experience ... we know that people on the outside by and large do not know, do not understand what life inside of a county jail or state prison is like,” he said.
He also hopes it can inspire people to look at the problems with the criminal justice system.
“It's the system, the carceral system, that we've just grown too accustomed to as being the way to handle harm in our society. And so being able to continue to use this project to have these conversations — music is a great vehicle,” he said.
Morse and the team at CHIP are producing a documentary on how the album was created. The idea is to show groups that work with other incarcerated populations that creative endeavors like this one are possible.
Smith, aka Prince Jooveh, served more than 17 years of a 20-year sentence he received at 18. He was released earlier this year. He said that for the artists, just having their music heard is impact enough.
“You don’t get positive when you're in prison. You get angry, you get mad, you get forceful and everything is just miserable. So to get that good energy coming from a response from something that wasn't even supposed to get out of prison, it is surreal,” he said.
