CLAIRE BRYANT | THE WASHINGTON POST

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

By Kathleen Parker

September 13, 2022

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.

But inside the prison chapel, which also serves as the program’s concert hall, a different mood held sway. Bryant and violinist Jennifer Curtis joined several Lee inmate-musicians recently, alternating performances before an audience of about 75 inmates, all of whom participate in one of Lee’s rehabilitation programs. Playing keyboard, guitars, drums and maracas, the men performed three songs they had composed during the pandemic, while Bryant and Curtis played tracks from Bryant’s new album, “Whole Heart.”

The inmates are standouts; they’ve committed no disciplinary infractions during their sentences and thus enjoy greater freedoms, including mobility and unlocked cells. Bryant, who grew up in nearby Camden and created the program eight years ago, told the gathering that she had dedicated her album to three men from the program who had died of covid and that their creative courage had inspired and “changed the way I perform in the outside world.”

In the past eight years, the program has produced 128 original songs, including an ambitious work of almost operatic scope called “Lincoln Portrait” — a collection of deeply researched songs highlighting Abraham Lincoln’s speeches and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Inspired by the Broadway hit “Hamilton,” the inmate-composers put together a rap extravaganza performed with haunting vocals by visiting New York jazz artist Sarah Elizabeth Charles.