Vocational music to Phila. prisoners' ears

Lorene Cary is founder and director of the Art Sanctuary and a senior lecturer in the University of Pennsylvania English department. Her novel "The Price of a Child" inaugurated the One Book, One Philadelphia program. Atria Books will publish her new novel, "If Sons, Then Heirs," in May.

I'd heard about the boys in Upper Darby who dragged a 13-year-old schoolmate through the snow, beat and kicked him, and hung him on a fence.

I hadn't seen it on television, and when the video thumbnails appeared on news sites, I did not watch. I recently finished a book in which a man is lynched. There's too much violence in my head as it is. And as I could not help the boy, I could at least do him the favor of not making him an object of my interest: something to look at as I passed by virtually. I didn't want to add another hit.

Then, a few days later, I turned on WURD's Morning Show With Bill Anderson. Callers and people writing to him on Facebook, he reported, were saying that the kids were out of control and should be locked up. Then "throw away the key."

"You can say, 'Throw away the key,' " he said, "But these are kids. . . . These are our kids . . . and remember that people are going to come back out."

Anderson's insistence made me think of my recent visits to the Philadelphia Detention Center, which houses "mostly minimum-custody adult males," according to its website, and "inmates serving weekend sentences at Alternative and Special Detention."

Many of these men are indeed coming back out, in months or weeks rather than years. Research and experience, warden Joyce Brown Adams has said, confirm that intervention during pretrial and short-term incarceration can change lives.

The Detention Center jazz band had been one such intervention activity, but it requires an outside sponsor, and outside groups, the warden said evenly, sometimes lose interest.

So, visiting composer and trumpeter Hannibal Lokumbe, whose new choral and orchestral piece will have its premiere at the Kimmel Center in December, began classes for what he calls the Music Liberation Orchestra: part music appreciation, part spiritual memoir workshop.

Lokumbe's premise, for his choral work as well as for the classes, is that each of us has a Door of No Return, like the Africans who were brought here into slavery, and that liberation comes when we go back through that door.

He aims to remind his students of their calling: as free men, and, especially, as fathers, because their lives are going to be even harder once they leave. As David Cole wrote in 2009 in the New York Review of Books about three books on the topic:

"In part because prisons today offer inmates little or nothing in the way of job training, education, or counseling regarding their return to society, ex-offenders' prospects for employment, housing, and marriage upon release drop precipitously from their already low levels before incarceration.

"That in turn makes it far more likely that these ex-offenders will return to criminal behavior - and then to prison. Meanwhile, the incarceration of so many young men means more single-parent households, and more children whose fathers are in prison. Children with parents in prison are in turn seven times more likely to be imprisoned at some point in their lives than other children."

More shame and more punishment will indeed scare the Upper Darby boys who dragged their schoolmate through the snow. It may break them. But what can intervene to give them a shot at wholeness? What can change them from wanting to hurt others?

The Music Liberation Orchestra, like underground hip-hop groups, convenes in a circle. On his last visit, Lokumbe had pulled his back. He did not reveal that to the men; he stood and hugged them as they entered. They brought with them the journals they'd been assigned to write for themselves and their children. It's one of the rules of the orchestra, along with renouncing violence and seeking the presence of the divine. I knew it hurt Lokumbe to breathe. He took out his trumpet, wedged his back against the molded plastic chair, and began to play a very old hymn. He played it with a burnished alto compassion, a smaller sound than I've ever heard him play, a hope-whisper that went deep inside to wellsprings that might, just possibly, bubble up within us and water the dry places.

Two weeks later, a fine trombonist, Brent White, and I returned. One inmate who had been skeptical about the orchestra had begun his journal. His face opened up when he said it. He asked us to tell Brother Hannibal that he was writing, and that it helped.