This album is more than music—it’s a declaration that humanity exists in places designed to strip it away. These songs carry the weight of lived experience and the fire of resilience. These voices remind us that creativity cannot be caged. – Babita Patel, storyteller, photographer, author of Breaking Out in Prison

This album bends the bars around conversations about marginality, about music itself. – Rijul Kataria, Head of Research, The Yuva Ekta Foundation

November 30, 2025

September 16, 2025

Bending The Bars: How A Group Of Incarcerated Artists Turned Phone Calls From Jail Into An Album

Service95: Creating art while incarcerated is an act of resistance – especially in an isolating environment increasingly hostile to self-expression. Barbie Rockstar appears on Bending the Bars, a 16-track album (available on all streaming platforms) written and recorded by currently and formerly incarcerated people, most of whom were in the Broward County Jail or a Florida state prison.

July 9, 2025

Bending the Bars: Hip-hop album showcases the talent at Broward County jails

WLRN Arts and Culture: 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.

June 27, 2025

Bending the Bars Is a Hip-Hop Album Recorded in Florida Jails

Miami New Times: Before it was an album, it was a nightly interruption. Gary Field, who was incarcerated in the Martin Correctional Institution in Indiantown, was trying to get some sleep while awaiting trial, no easy task in a place where walls are thin, concrete echoes are loud, and impromptu rap battles break out at 1 a.m. “I didn’t want to hear it,” Field recalls in a deep, radio-worthy voice during a call from jail with New Times. “People were banging on their chests, on their bars, having these Dirty South-style rap sessions, and I couldn’t stop it. But after a while, I realized: there’s real talent in here. It just didn’t have a platform.”

June 19, 2025

‘Bending the Bars’ album highlights incarcerated artists

NPR: All Things Considered: A new hip-hop album takes us inside the Florida prison system – featuring fifteen artists in correctional facilities across the state.

June 19, 2025

Bending the Bars: New Album Showcases the Queer and Trans Resilience of Incarcerated Artists

Autostraddle: What does Black transfemme empowerment sound like? For artist Ciara Banks, AKA Chuckie Lee (Bride of Chuckie), it sounds like her pop-infused girl power hip-hop anthem “Barbie Rockstar.” With Chuckie Lee’s rapidfire flow and her no-holds-barred attitude, she raps: “Party Rockstar…Barbie / Everybody movin’ like a fast car…Zoom / Swerving in and out of lanes that part / I came from nothing now I’m shooting to the stars.”

June 4, 2025

‘Helping people survive’: how creating a hip-hop album saved incarcerated artists

The Guardian: The result is nearly an hour of uniquely south Floridian hip-hop and R&B, both of which are constellations of so many genres – Caribbean beats, southern bass, Deep City soul, Miami drill – poetic musings on love, loneliness and hope, and demands for systemic change to the draconian and brutal conditions of the Florida prison system.

May 30, 2025

“Bending the Bars” Rap Album Fights Damaging Stereotypes of Incarcerated People

Truthout: Here is the truth: Art rescues us from oppression. Bending the Bars is one thread in a long quilt, woven by voices over the centuries, and one sorely needed now….Trump has long used racist stereotypes and fearmongering about incarcerated people to push a right-wing authoritarian takeover. Now he is extending that fearmongering to dissidents and political enemies — and next, could be you. This is why we need to see artists like Prince Jooveh, who says he rediscovered himself in music. “I got to see myself as an artist,” he said in an interview after he was released in February. “I got a job. I’m looking for a recording studio.” He was breathless on the phone. “I saw the effect my song had on people. It was electrifying.”

May 28, 2025

Pre-Release Celebration with IMAJIN, featuring Rijul Kataria and L. LeDonne

May 12, 2025

Behind Bars and Binaries: Music, Identity, and the Fight for Liberation

Project Censored: In the first part of the program, Nikki Morse, Noam Brown and Prince Jooveh talk about the album Bending the Bars, a project created via makeshift jail phone setups in order to uplift and amplify the voices of incarcerated musicians. Our guests discuss the myriad powers of music, from therapy to frontline reporting to bridges between rival gangs and political perspectives. They dive into the barriers and indeed the freedom in creating an album without the support or collaboration of the carceral system, and how their work can be, and indeed should be repeated by others across the prison industrial complex.

May 1, 2025

Beats of the Month: From Community Jail Hotline to an Album of Original Music by Incarcerated Artists

On April 5, 2020, a group of South Florida abolitionists were doing a noise demo in solidarity with prisoners and, as part of the Incarcerated Workers’ Organizing Committee’s nationwide efforts to establish jail hotlines, decided to share a phone number with people inside. From that moment, organizers began to receive calls as the number was shared inside South Florida jails. Over the next week or two, organizers used noise demos to spread the number to other jails and formed the COVID-19 Hotline for Incarcerated People.

March 26, 2025

Recording an Album from Behind Bars Isn’t Easy; They Did It Anyway

“At the core of Bending the Bars are universal messages of self-compassion and hope; and an appeal for systemic change. With over 3,000 county jails in the U.S., Bending the Bars serves as a replicable model for using music to empower, rehabilitate, and connect incarcerated individuals with opportunities that extend far beyond prison walls. The upcoming documentary will further provide a roadmap for expanding access to creative platforms nationwide.

“Bending the Bars is proof that talent, creativity, and resilience can thrive even in the most unlikely places. It’s an invitation for others to follow suit, to create platforms for the incarcerated, and to recognize the abundant artistry that exists behind bars and razor wire.”

March 15, 2025

“They Can’t Beat All of Us”

A Reportback from the Florida Abolitionist Gathering