MEREDITH RIZZO/THE MARSHALL PROJECT. IMAGES: MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES, MIGUEL A. PADRIÑAN/PEXELS, TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS AND DIE JIM CROW RECORDS
By Maurice Chammah, The Marshall Project, August 3, 2023
One morning in 2019, Kenyatta Emmanuel Hughes was released from Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, New York, and traveled 70 miles south to Carnegie Hall. That night, he stood before a crowd — flanked by a horn section, string quartet and backup singers — and sang words he’d written during his nearly quarter-century behind bars.
He’d been convicted of killing a cab driver during a robbery in 1996, when he was 21 years old. “I had no value for life back then,” he once told a reporter — and that included his own life, which he tried to end while in prison. Now 45, he sang over a steady pulse of piano chords: “Can’t we agree there’s something wrong, if I feel the need to scream, ‘My life matters’? And why in the world, to you, does that feel like an accusation?”
Hughes had studied with conservatory-trained musicians at Musicambia and Carnegie Hall’s Musical Connections, two programs that teach composition and various instruments in prisons. As a criminal justice journalist and musician myself, I’ve long admired such arts programs for cultivating hope and dignity amid all the abuse and neglect, while reducing the chances that people will return to prison.
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