Why a visit to a maximum-security South Carolina prison gave me hope

BISHOPVILLE, S.C. — Cellist Claire Bryant is what we lesser mortals would call a prodigy. In recent years, she has also become a miracle worker, taking her musical talents to some of the least served people in America — incarcerated men at the Lee Correctional Institution, South Carolina’s largest maximum-security prison — and transforming them into polished musicians and performers.

As members of a Carnegie Hall-spawned musical ensemble called Decoda, she and her colleagues work with inmates here to compose and perform their own music. As a witness to the program, about which I’ve written before, I can attest to the transformative power of music — for inmates, audiences and professional musicians themselves.

Until last Friday, Bryant had not been able to visit Lee since the arrival of the coronavirus in early 2020. The site of a mass riot in 2018 that left seven dead and many others wounded, Lee’s vast complex of all-male dorms housing more than 1,000 convicted criminals can be daunting to the uninitiated. You can’t walk the prison’s maze of corridors, through slamming electronic doors, without a grudging sense of trepidation.

As members of a Carnegie Hall-spawned musical ensemble called Decoda, she and her colleagues work with inmates here to compose and perform their own music. As a witness to the program, about which I’ve written before, I can attest to the transformative power of music — for inmates, audiences and professional musicians themselves.

Until last Friday, Bryant had not been able to visit Lee since the arrival of the coronavirus in early 2020. The site of a mass riot in 2018 that left seven dead and many others wounded, Lee’s vast complex of all-male dorms housing more than 1,000 convicted criminals can be daunting to the uninitiated. You can’t walk the prison’s maze of corridors, through slamming electronic doors, without a grudging sense of trepidation.

Since then, Stirling has decreased the prison population by about 30 percent and can boast the lowest recidivism rate in the country, at about 20 percent. He has almost doubled officers’ starting salaries to $50,000. He has instituted programs in job training and interview techniques and, in direct response to the riots that occurred under his watch, created the Academy of Hope, where inmates from prisons around the state, many of them former gang members, go to learn communications and other skills to help them stanch the violence.

“Stirling realized he couldn’t reach the prisoners and needed to do something completely different,” says DOC Director of Communications Chrysti Shain. Different has paid off.

Once inmates graduate from the Academy of Hope, they return to prisons as peacemakers. At Lee, they daily visit all cellblocks, called “dorms,” to “check the temperature,” as one put it, and to help fellow inmates resolve differences peacefully. Not surprisingly, it’s easier for inmates to take advice from fellow inmates than from state officers. “They respect us,” one of the men, age 40, told me. “A lot of them grew up in prison. I’ve been here 23 years.”

Two years ago, an academy-trained inmate stepped in and saved the life of a prison lieutenant who was being stabbed by an inmate. “That wouldn’t have happened in a million years before the academy,” says Shain.

Between music and manners, South Carolina’s worst offenders stand a better chance of reentering civil society and staying out of prison. And society stands a much better chance of staying safe.

Washington Post