Supporting musical affordances for desistance and resistance in youth justice settings

ABSTRACT

As criminological perspectives of youth justice shift from rehabilitative ideals to desistance frameworks whereby young people assume a central role in their own identity-development and relationships with others, child-centred approaches that afford youth with agency and voice have been seen as increasingly important. However, noting that desistance is not only a process of identity (re)construction but a relational one in which individuals establish a sense of belonging, who young people engage with have a significant impact on their desistance journeys. The research reported in this article examined how musicians conceptualise their aims and practices in youth detention centres in relation to the desistance journeys of incarcerated youth in Australia. Findings illustrate music’s affordances for desistance as spaces of asylum for young people, providing respite from carceral pains, opportunities for agential creativity and enjoyment, but also political and disruptive potentials to resist the inequities and injustices of the status quo and create alternative futures.

KEYWORDS:

• Desistance
• music
• music education
• musical affordances
• youth justice

Introduction

As youth justice systems around the world shift from punitive responses to youth offending to rehabilitative approaches, musicians are increasingly volunteering or employed by not-for-profit or other organisations to work with incarcerated youth. Music has been seen as an engaging, strengths-based medium through which young people can not only express themselves but redefine their identities towards ‘a self that does not revolve around criminal activity’ (Barrett and Baker 2012, 252), offering individual and social benefits far beyond the acquisition of musical skills. Such programmes have included hip hop and rap composition workshops (e.g. Cain and Cursley 2017; Hickey 2018), instrumental classes (e.g. Barrett and Baker 2012; Daykin et al. 2017; Thompson 2022) and Javanese gamelan ensembles (e.g. Henley 2016, 2015), with positive outcomes noted across musical idioms, facilitator-backgrounds (as therapist, educator or musician-facilitator) and duration. While there is an emerging body of research focusing on the experiences of incarcerated youth participating in music programmes, the aims and practices of organisations and musicians providing such opportunities remain unclear. Furthermore, as understandings of the place and purpose of youth detention is contested in many parts of the world, how music programmes support or hinder broader agendas warrants critical attention. In this article, I report an investigation of musicians’ roles and experiences in Australian youth detention centres, examining how musicians understand their work in relation to young peoples’ desistance journeys. Through interviews conducted with the founder of one not-for-profit organisation, the Australian Children’s Music Foundation (ACMF) and three peripatetic musicians employed by ACMF, I examine their aims in facilitating music programmes, their understandings of the need for music programmes, the skills required to facilitate such programmes, and the ways in which such programmes are situated within (and against) the detention centre context.

Justice-involved youth in Australia

It has been widely recognised by policymakers and the public alike that the youth justice systems of all of Australia’s six federated states (Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia) and two territories (the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory) are in urgent need of change. In 2021–2022, there were 45,210 young people between the ages of 10 and 18 years convicted of a criminal offence in Australia. Many justice-involved youth have a history of proceedings against them by police, with 46% of youth in the Northern Territory having been proceeded against by police at least once before (ABS 2023). This regularity of involvement with law enforcement increases markedly across the country for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth, who are incarcerated anywhere between 5 and 21 times more often than their non-Indigenous peers (AIHW 2022). On any given night, 4536 young people are under youth justice supervision (ABS 2023), 76% of whom are held on remand despite incarceration intended as a ‘last resort’ (Clancey, Wang, and Lin 2020, 5). Youth detention costs taxpayers over two thousand dollars per day (as compared to the AUD $130 spent per child, per day under community supervision (Government of Western Australia 2023). Coupled with high recidivism rates where up to 80% of youth reoffend within 10 years (Pisani 2022), the costs of youth detention have been increasingly called into question.

Furthermore, justice-involved youth disproportionately represent youth from under resourced and vulnerable backgrounds. Over a third are from extremely low socioeconomic backgrounds, many have a history of mental health issues, conduct disorders, anxiety disorders, substance use and post-traumatic stress disorders (AIHW 2023; Smeijsters et al. 2011; Young, Greer, and Church 2017), compounding disadvantages associated with poor educational engagement, adverse childhood events, social disadvantage, with low levels of mental and physical health and wellbeing (Daykin et al. 2017; Gardstrom 2012; Haysom, Kasinathan, and Singh 2023; Wolf and Holochwost 2016). Up to 60% of youth in Australian detention centres have a history of interactions with Child Protective Services with notices even being issued for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children before birth, representing ‘lifelong interactions with child protection and justice systems, entrenched disadvantage and institutionalisation and disconnection from culture, community and family’ (Chamberlain et al. 2022, 253). Particularly for vulnerable young people, detention itself has been recognised as criminogenic, inflicting additional stressors and traumas as systems prioritise security over ‘cultural sensitivities and trauma-informed approaches’ (which were further exacerbated by Australia’s mandatory quarantine measures during the early COVID-19 pandemic, Haysom, Kasinathan, and Singh 2023, 264). Furthermore, ‘sustained patterns of abuse, humiliation, denial of basic human needs, and long-lasting physical and psychological damage’ (Clancey, Wang, and Lin 2020, 6) identified in some detention centres highlight the urgent need for more diversionary and child-centred responses to youth crime, within which music has been seen to hold significant potential (see Kallio 2022).

Mapping musical affordances for desistance

Music has long been recognised to be an important resource for young people’s identity development, self-regulation, social connectedness and wellbeing (McFerran, Derrington, and Saarikallio 2019; Tarrant, North, and Hargreaves 2002). Considering how incarcerated youth may use music, Tia DeNora’s (2002) theorisation of musical affordances helps to recast music from a rehabilitative stimulus to ‘an organising medium, as something that helps to structure … styles of consciousness, ideas, or modes of embodiment’ (21). However, how music can organise types and ways of being cannot be planned in advance, as she explains,

[T]he concept of affordance […] posits music as something acted with and acted upon. It is only through this appropriation that music comes to ‘afford’ things, which is to say that music’s affordances, while they may be anticipated, cannot be pre-determined but rather depend upon how music’s ‘users’ connect music to other things; how they interact with and in turn act upon music as they have activated it. (DeNora 2003, 48)

In this sense, while music is implicated ‘in the construction [or reconstruction] of the self’ (DeNora 2000, 46), this agency is always relationally defined, with ‘music as a manifestation of the social, and the social, likewise, [as] a manifestation of music’ (DeNora 2003, 151). This emphasis upon the relational dimensions of agency aligns with recent developments in positive criminology that highlight the importance of young people being cast as key actors in their own desistance journeys (e.g. Case and Hampson 2019) but also that shifts in ‘behaviour or identity [are also related to young peoples’] sense of belonging to a (moral and political) community’ (McNeill 2016, 201). Young peoples’ desistance from engaging in criminal activity in the future is thus conceptualised not as an externally imposed or designed outcome but a ‘dynamic process of human development – one that is situated in and profoundly affected by its social contexts – in which persons move away from offending and towards social re/integration’ (Graham and McNeill 2017, 435).

Musical affordances for desistance can thus be seen to emerge in relation to young peoples’ own identities, histories and belongings; the musicians working in detention centres; cultural and social meanings associated with different kinds of music; and also the youth detention centre setting. As definitions of youth justice in Australia oscillate frequently between ideals of ‘tough on crime’ penal populism and rising concerns for child welfare, understandings of youth detention are neither stable nor fixed. Rather, musicians' aims and activities are subject to paradoxical and complex pressures that are ‘exerted historically, culturally, socio-economically, academically/empirically and in the contexts of policy-making, practice, media and public opinion’ (Case and Haines 2021, 4). Consequently, musicians working in these settings are not able to rely upon a fixed and pre-determined job profile, but rather need to construct their roles in relation to the youth they work together with but also detention centre ‘rules and regulations, as well as issues of power, identity and social relations’ (Daykin et al. 2017, 945).

The social and material features of youth justice thus shape how music may be activated for, and by, incarcerated youth, not only supporting but potentially constraining musical affordances for desistance. Indeed, several scholars have pointed to the potential for music programmes to impose normative subjectivities upon youth (see Kallio 2022, 2023; Clennon 2015; Daykin et al. 2017; Sankofa et al. 2018; Shieh 2010), limiting the extent to which youth can exercise agency and explore connections that exceed dominant sensibilities. In this way, music might expose both constraints and possibilities for subjectification, with music serving as a map of power relations both in, and beyond, youth detention. Thus, how musicians situate themselves within youth justice systems, orient themselves and their work politically and ethically, and how these relations inform their practice, may have a significant impact upon what music can do, as either an emergent and disruptive or coercive and disciplinary force.

Research approach

The overarching aim of this instrumental case study (Stake 1995) was to examine how musicians working in youth detention centres understand their work in relation to the desistance processes of incarcerated youth. This aim was addressed through four research questions:

1. What are musicians’ aims in facilitating music programmes for incarcerated youth?

2. In what ways do musicians support musical affordances for desistance in youth detention centres?

3. What skills do musicians feel they need to successfully facilitate music programmes for incarcerated youth?

4. In what ways do musicians feel that the detention centre context constrains musical affordances for desistance?

Acknowledging that most music programmes run in youth detention centres are delivered by outside charities, NGOs (non-government organisations), or volunteers, this study focused on the work of one not-for-profit organisation that has provided music lessons in Australian youth detention centres since 2004. With the study conducted under ethics approvals provided by Griffith University (Reference number 2022/204), participants included the organisation founder and three musicians employed by the organisation and selected by the organisation manager as representing different locations, musical backgrounds, and levels of experience teaching music in youth detention centres. At request of the organisation founder and manager, the Australian Children’s Music Foundation (ACMF) is here named, as is the founder Don Spencer. The three musicians are all white Australian men, and are here assigned the pseudonyms Sean, Warren and Richard. Each research participant is introduced briefly below:

Don Spencer OAM is a singer-songwriter and musician in his 80s, best known for his work in children’s music and television both in Australia and the United Kingdom. Three of his albums received awards for gold and platinum sales, and he has been nominated and awarded for Best Children’s Album and Children’s Song of the Year by the Tamworth Songwriters Awards and Australian Recording Industry Association Awards. Don established the ACMF in 2002, and was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2007 in recognition of the contributions of ACMF and his work in children's music and television.

Sean is in his early fifties and is an accomplished jazz guitarist with considerable experience teaching in studio and university settings. At the time of data generation, Sean had been working with the organisation teaching two weekly sessions of guitar and ukulele in a youth detention centre for approximately 10 months. His first session is held for both boys and girls, outside of the main centre as part of the school day. His second session takes place after school in the boys’ residential unit common area (for example, a living room area located where smaller groups of young people are housed).

Warren is a singer songwriter and sound engineer in his late fifties with extensive experience as a performing musician around Australia and overseas. Warren had been employed by the organisation for over 12 years, teaching guitar and songwriting classes one to two times per week to incarcerated youth. His sessions took place in common areas of residential units rotating between units on each weekly visit, as well as one high security unit where several young people are housed following a series of conflicts and disturbances.

Richard is in his mid-thirties and is an established country music singer and guitarist based in a regional centre. Richard began working with the organisation approximately two years ago as COVID-19 pandemic-related restrictions on youth justice activities in Australia were eased. Starting a new weekly music programme in the programmes area of the youth detention centre, Richard was very particular about what was needed, and the detention centre had provided (and funded) a dedicated music room equipped which he equipped with a number of community-donated guitars, drum kits, bass guitars and amplifiers, in addition to other instruments such as small percussion, a television, computers and recording equipment.

Data generation involved an in-person semi-structured interview conducted with the founder of the organisation focused on the history and overarching aim and values of the music programmes run by the organisation in youth detention centres, in addition to two online semi-structured interviews conducted with each of the three musicians employed by the organisation. These interviews followed a format adapted from Seidman (2006) where the first interview focused on locating the ‘participants’ experience in context’ (17) aiming to understand musicians’ backgrounds and history of working with the organisation, and the second interview sought stories of their experiences teaching in youth detention. All interviews were approximately 1 h in duration and were audio-recorded and transcribed. A reflexive thematic analysis approach was applied to all interview transcripts, generating ‘themes developed from codes, and conceptualised as patterns of shared meaning underpinned by’ the theoretical framework of the study (Braun and Clarke 2021, 39). All participants were given the opportunity to read a draft manuscript prior to submission as an opportunity for member checking.

Researcher positionality

In clarifying the lens through which I interpret the perspectives and stories of Don, Sean, Warren and Richard, it is necessary to offer a brief overview of my own social locations. I am a white, cis-female, heterosexual, first-generation Australian with Scottish, German, French and English ancestry. My musical background is eclectic, having been trained as a classical pianist and secondary school music educator, in addition to identifying as a singer-songwriter and playing/performing ukulele and guitar with more recent experimentations with a theremin and the bagpipes. I have lived experience of the justice system as a child and young adult, though have no experience of incarceration. Prior to undertaking degrees in music education (2007, 2015), I completed a Bachelor of Social Studies (Criminology) (2004) during which I also worked with justice-involved youth between the ages of 8 and 17-years-of-age as a government-assigned tutor. Through these relations, in addition to those I had working with justice-involved youth as a secondary school music teacher, I witnessed significant discrepancies between government policy agendas aiming to reduce youth offending and the support offered to young people themselves. Furthermore, I found the availability of support to be highly inequitable, meaning that many of the youth that I worked with (often racialised boys and young men from underserved communities) did not have the same opportunities as I was afforded. Critically attending to music education as a political arena, whereby individuals and social groups negotiate meaning, value, ideals and power, my research brings together music education and criminology to better understand processes of governance and control that imbue music-making in both educational and youth justice contexts, with the aim of better meeting the needs of all young people, irrespective of background or circumstance.

Discussion of findings

The thematic analysis identified four central themes: (1) The aims of music programmes; (2) Supporting musical affordances for desistance; (3) Learning on-the-job; and (4) Contextual constraints. This section of the article discusses these four themes in turn to examine how music programmes might provide affordances for desistance in youth detention centres and how the detention centre setting might shape these affordances for incarcerated youth.

(1)	‘I never ask [what they’re in for] … which is a really good thing. That’s the only avenue for change’1: The aims of music programmes

While all research participants all spoke of the aims of music programmes being to support the ‘rehabilitation’ of young people through music, the meanings they assigned to this term aligned more with desistance theories than implementing music interventions designed to achieve pre-determined rehabilitative outcomes. Participants explained that rather than music being able to generate predictable outcomes, it provided young people with an opportunity to ‘connect with [their] emotions and … also with who [they] are … in terms of exploring “where am I?”, “how can I improve my life?”’ (Warren, 5 May 2023). Both Sean and Warren emphasised that they were never provided with, nor ever wanted, any information regarding young people’s offending histories or reasons for being incarcerated. They both saw this as important to afford young people with opportunities to take the lead in (re)defining themselves in and through music. Similarly, Richard explained it was important to meet each child as an individual, situated within time and place, and that musical ambitions often take a back seat to more social goals:

My main thing is enjoyment and inclusiveness … that’s all I care about … if they happen to learn something and pick up the guitar and play a few chords, yes, of course they're doing that … but it’s so much more than that. (Richard, 21 July 2023)

In enabling youth to narrate their own identities and the trajectories in which they were heading, it was considered by all musicians and the founder of the not-for-profit organisation to be extremely important, not only to provide children with opportunities to reflect upon their past experiences but also reflect upon how they may (re)construct their futures (DeNora 2000). In this sense, the aims of music programmes align with ‘the institution’s official culture’ (DeNora 2013, 49), particularly as Australian youth justice policy increasingly emphasises youth involvement in youth justice processes as effective and efficient ways to reduce youth offending. However, the aims of music programmes were described less linearly, as Don explained the impetus behind founding the organisation, ‘my circumstances [as a child were also] tough … and I just know that music can help kids who are very unhappy, so it was as simple as that’ (15 May 2023).

Musicians also described that by bringing together the tactile, aural, and visual senses in a focused and intensive way, they aimed to ‘chang[e] the atmosphere’ (Warren, 5 May 2023) and calm an otherwise very ‘intense’ (Sean, 5 May 2023), distracting, and ‘difficult environment’ (Warren, 10 May 2023). This aligns with previous research findings that suggest that the hyperarousal and hypervigilance of youth in detention centres can have significant impacts upon their participation in music programmes (Daykin et al. 2017). However, while musicians felt that many young people struggled to focus, music was also seen to provide a ‘refuge’ (Sean, 5 May 2023) for those who found the everyday chaos overwhelming. DeNora (2013) describes such ‘respite from distress’ through music as a musical asylum: ‘a place and time … to be able to feel creative and to engage in creative play, to enjoy a sense of validation or connection to others, to feel pleasure, perhaps to note the absence, or temporary abatement, of pain’ (1). Importantly, she notes that music does not only afford opportunities ‘to occasion social action and to calibrate feeling parameters and feeling styles at the individual level – as a technology of self’ but also serves as a ‘matrix for public [and collective] memory, commemoration and emotion’ (4). However, the musical asylums constructed by youth through these programmes were not always comfortable, as Don clarified:

It’s not … “let’s all sing happy songs today” … some of the songs [that the young people] write are not happy songs … there’s no way you can make everything happy with what’s going on … . but it’s the experience [that we want to be positive]. (Don, 15 May 2023)

(2)	‘It's a really difficult environment to survive in’2: Supporting musical affordances for desistance

All research participants emphasised that music fulfilled a need of young people to make decisions in their own lives and exercise agency through choosing what kinds of music they would learn, play, or create. In relation to the broader detention centre context where young peoples’ lives are highly regulated, programs offered a musical means for the ‘making of room – for creativity, expressivity, flow and flourishing’ but also as ‘a way of gaining distance (space) from pathogenic factors that foster distress, pain or oppression’ (DeNora 2013, 136). As such, when young people needed temporary relief from the pains of incarceration, music programs could help youth to replace the imposing auditory environment with ‘sound created through [their] own agency’ (Lindsay 2023, 113):

[kids are] forgetting about being in [the detention centre]. [They’re] forgetting about all the shit that happened yesterday or before, or … not thinking about all of the shit that might happen later. [They’re] thinking about what’s happening right now, so that already is a game changer. (Richard, 21 July 2023)

Within such spaces of music asylums, musicians thought that young people could map their futures but also locate themselves within rich histories and relations beyond the detention centre gates, as a form of self-care, a space for them to ‘dream, play and otherwise engage with an alternate world’ (DeNora 2013, 72). However, this alternate world was not always what musicians expected. Rather than the music that Richard and Warren associated with ‘youth culture’, they described receiving frequent requests to learn music from decades ago:

For a lot of the Indigenous kids, [the American singer] Charley Pride is really popular … like the 1960s crooner … It is definitely a connection to [their homes and] families … . they are also familiar with the some of the more obscure songs [by Australian Country and Aboriginal Rock group Warumpi Band in the 1980s] like ‘Fitzroy Crossing’, but they know those [older] songs … it's in their culture and that’s where that comes from, it comes from families. (Warren, 5 May 2023)

Richard explained that these songs were often not young peoples’ ‘own music’ but that which was:

Playing loud in their family homes, with uncles and aunts singing around campfires …  the music they grew up with … the songs that they listened to with their mum and dad … that’s a connection … it’s sort of bringing them back to when they were with their family … so they get to think about and reminisce the times that they’ve had … and there’s some sort of connection with music every single step of the way. (Richard 21 July 2023)

Music was thus seen as an opportunity for youth to refurnish the affective environment by mapping musical histories and connections to family, culture and community, ‘so as to make those environments more conducive to being (a [connected and relational] self) in the world’ (DeNora 2013, 50). DeNora (2013) explains that music can be engaged as a technology of memory, structuring not only what is remembered, but also how it is remembered. Through this lens, music may also be seen as a means for youth to refuse the colonial framings of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families as ‘deficient and dysfunctional’ warranting state intervention (Dunstan, Hewitt, and Nakata 2020, 323; see also Kallio 2023) and resist the collective orderings of the carceral system. In this way, music asylums are not an anaesthetic escapism, but may be seen to afford an ontological security within which young people might articulate political subjectivities and relationships outside of ‘majority logics of social stratification, criminality, and law and order’ (McNeill 2014, 4200). Music could thus serve as a resource for youth to make historical, cultural, contextual, and political connections and claims, a means to define and express who they are (or who they are not), and locate where (and with whom) they belong.

(3)	‘I don’t have any experience and I’m not trained … I’m a musician’3: learning on the job

None of the research participants described having any formal training in teaching or working with incarcerated youth. They described a need to constantly learn-on-the-job in developing the pedagogical and musical skills to respond to who they were working together with and the context. Sean described a need to expand his musical repertoires, as when young people wanted to learn contemporary pop or rock songs, he was not always familiar with them, and in residential units he couldn’t take in a phone or laptop to play songs or search for guitar tabs. He explained that it wasn’t enough to search at home in preparation for the following session either, as:

Everything is in this constant state of flux … I don't have any set plan because most of the time I don't know what I'm going to be encountering. (Sean, 5 May 2023)

This was not only in relation to constantly shifting youth justice populations as young people ‘got bail or … [were] … released or moved on’ (Richard, 21 July 2023), but also variations in young peoples’ attendance or engagement due to changes to ‘the medications that the kids are on … it completely messes them up until they stabilise again’ (Sean, 5 May 2023). However, while their work required immense flexibility and skills in improvisation, consistency in their work was seen as very important. Particularly given that ‘the main carers of the kids in prison are the guards’ (Warren, 10 May 2023), musicians felt that their presence made possible a different kind of adult–child relationship with clear ‘difference[s] in the kids’ reactions and their interactions … [between adults who were responsible for] [saying] "get in your cell now … we’re locking the doors" and "you’ve been a bad boy" and the programs staff’ (Richard, 21 July 2023). This not only required musicians to tolerate uncertainty relating to attendance and capacity for participation, but also young peoples’ behaviour associated with ‘frustration and aggression … and [intensely offensive] language’ (Warren, 10 May 2023) more than they would in other teaching contexts. This was described as a balance between tolerating uncertainty and discomfort and establishing expectations of music sessions as the bases fortrusting relationships. Don specifically noted that he hoped to employ musicians with:

the right temperament and empathy, because they’d have to put up with a lot … because [young people] were angry with the world and they don’t trust you … one of the fundamental things was that they [the musicians] could never not turn up … You really have to win their trust … no matter what happens, you’ve got to be there next time. I mean, it’s not like [young people] can do whatever [they] want to us and we will still be here, but rather, [if there is a conflict or altercation, we say], “Okay, that’s not right. I’d like you to think about it. We’ll be back, we’ll see you next time and try again”. (Don, 15 May 2023)

While musicians emphasised that they didn’t have ‘any training in working with high-needs students … or [who] are suffering from severe trauma’ (Sean, 5 May 2023), this consistency was seen as essential to build rapport, ‘to make sure that [young] people felt safe with me and I felt safe around them’ (Richard, 21 July 2023).

The need to navigate uncertainty was also noted in responding to young peoples’ varied abilities, as musicians described working with children with ‘severe intellectual abilities’ to those who could already play music proficiently (Warren, 5 May 2023). In doing so, musicians prioritised collective experiences of achievement in learning over learning musical knowledge or skills themselves. As Warren explained:

[It’s] super important [that young people] feel that they're achieving something … Because … their learning prospects are so diminished. Probably their schooling is way behind. And any little sort of thing that makes them think “I can do this” or “I can be proud of this” is such a valuable thing. (Warren, 5 May 2023)

Yet, how young people expressed their growing self-confidence did not always manifest as musicians expected. Sean found one 15-year-old boy particularly interesting to teach, as despite the detention centre staff explaining that he was always really looking forward to guitar lessons:

he rarely gives you real eye contact … he’s almost looking at you from the side … it’s almost as though there’s no ability to admit any sort of enthusiasm … or showing any sort of vulnerability of not being able to do something or know something. (Sean, 12 May 2023)

Although Sean had noticed a clear improvement in his guitar skills over the months, he didn’t attribute this to his teaching but rather his presence, ‘it’s just that thing of going back every week … knowing that the music teacher’s coming back’ (Sean, 12 May 2023). This approach shared amongst the musicians that afforded youth choice as to whether to participate or not (indeed, musicians often described youth sitting in just to watch and listen), to what degree, and on their own terms, aligns with research on engaging with trauma-affected youth, encouraging ‘engagement when they feel safe and ready to do so’ (Bauman-Field 2024, 6). In this sense, musicians designed music sessions as opportunities for youth ‘to work with each other and … have respect for the other kids and … their capabilities’ (Warren, 5 May 2023) rather than establishing expectations for individuals or collectives.

(4)	‘If I didn’t turn up for a month, I don’t think anybody would [be upset]’4: Contextual constraints

Musicians and the organisation founder all described both explicit and more subtle ‘features of the youth justice environment’ that mediated musical affordances for desistance (Daykin et al. 2017, 945). Organisation founder Don lamented that inconsistencies in financial and political support made planning and implementing music programmes difficult:

The political side of it has been my most frustrating thing, because you get a politician on side [who is] desperately trying to help us … and [we were discussing] the next five or ten years … in detail … and they moved [him] to the minister of defence and the next education minister did nothing. It’s like somebody says, ‘here it is’ and someone else takes it away … then we start all over again. (Don, 15 May 2023)

At the local detention centre level, Warren often found himself questioning whether or not the detention centre staff valued music, especially when plans had been made for him to work with the children only to be told that they were ‘locking the kids down now’ upon his arrival (Warren, 10 May 2023). Working in a centre with documented staffing shortages also affected Warren’s ability to deliver music programmes, ‘because I have to be escorted everywhere in the facility’. When staffing issues arose, the well-equipped band room was closed due to lack of supervision. While he noted that ‘the institution [has] it’s own processes [that] can be quite frustrating’ when music is ‘undervalued and just not considered’ (10 May 2023), there were also occasional opportunities to put together small ensembles to perform at particular events (such as NAIDOC week which acknowledges and commemorates Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, cultures and histories) and even to parents (in person or online):

[those opportunities are] fantastic in terms of getting to build up into something … and then [young people] can get the feeling what it’s like to have [all of the instruments] working together … that’s really important … just the communication and skills it takes to do that as a group. (Warren, 10 May 2023)

The degree to which music programmes were seen to belong as a regular part of centre operations rather than an occasional celebration was also questioned in relation to communication between musicians and other staff, as there was often ‘no sharing of ideas’ or information (Warren, 5 May 2023). These sentiments were echoed by Sean, who felt that his work was:

Not really on anybody’s radar … If I didn’t turn up for a month, I don’t think anybody would [be upset]. Music seems to be something that’s dependent on [the efforts of] individuals rather than the system. (Sean, 12 May 2023)

These experiences contrasted with Richard’s, where the detention centre had funded a dedicated music room and provided considerable support via a broader programmes department. Indeed, the programmes staff also supported Richard’s work by playing guitar together with young people in between his sessions, developing their skills and confidence as well as forging closer relationships between youth and other staff members. Despite this collaborative approach between Richard and the programmes staff, he still expressed frustration with the extent to which the detention centre setting constrained musical affordances for desistance. This was primarily because not all of the young people in the centre were allowed to access music as a result of:

levels or gradings of [their] behaviour … where level one is you get fed, you get a bed, you go to school, and you get up in the morning and do it again … so level one, they can’t come to the music program, they’re not invited. (Richard, 21 July 2023)

This, Richard lamented, often meant that those who would benefit most from music programmes were denied access to his sessions:

I had my way … [it would be] “music is on for one and all this afternoon and you're all invited”! … how can music change the life of someone that isn't given the opportunity? (Richard, 21 July 2023)

Concluding remarks

According to Don Spencer, the founder of the Australian Children’s Music Foundation, and the three musicians employed by the organisation to provide music programmes in youth detention centres, the primary aims of these programmes were not musical nor to serve as a rehabilitative intervention. Rather, their aims to offer youth a creative arena for agency and social connection align well with desistance theories that emphasise the role of such experiences for youth to develop a positive self-concept and skills for social re/integration (Graham and McNeill 2017). Music was seen as particularly effective in affording youth with these experiences through regular and consistent contact with musicians, with young people developing identities as musicians and learners themselves and forging positive relationships with adults. Music was also seen to offer young people asylum (DeNora 2013) from the pains of incarceration. In part, this was as a space for creativity and fun not easily found elsewhere in the detention centre, but music also offered an asylum from the materially imposed soundscape of the centre which was often loud and chaotic by providing youth with the tools to refurnish the space with sounds of their own making. The opportunity to musically experiment and take risks was also seen to enable youth to creatively (re)narrate their own identities and future trajectories, but also to maintain connections beyond centre gates – to culture, family and community. Connecting to shared histories and understandings through music, as a collective ‘technology of memory’ (DeNora 2013, 116), may afford youth with an ontological security to create and share resources for collective consciousness in ways that exceed the majoritarian and normalising logics of youth justice and even the musicians who work together with them. Thus, while musical affordances for desistance were seen to be constrained by the peripheral positioning of music programmes in detention centre operations, volatile political and funding landscapes, and a lack of understanding of centre staff, the ways in which musicians themselves may be disciplined by carceral logics also warrants further attention (see also Daykin et al. 2017; Kallio 2023). In this sense, as one of the musicians participating in this study considered the potentials of music to change the broader youth justice system, asking:

[what] if the whole [youth justice system] was like a programs centre where [kids] learned things that made [them] more resilient and … actually assisted [them] in making [their] own decisions? (21 July 2023)

We may thus ask how music may not only offer youth asylum as a space away from pain, discomfort and distress, or space for creativity and fun, but also as a political and disruptive space towards alternative futures that resist the inequities and injustices of the status quo – as an always emergent, aesthetic and abolitionist, project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a New Researcher Grant funded by the Arts, Education and Law group of Griffith University.

Notes on contributors

Alexis Anja Kallio

Alexis Anja Kallio is Deputy Director (Research) of the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University. With expertise in the politics of music education and critical criminology, her current research focuses on the potentials of music education for justice-involved youth in Australia. She is editor of Difference and Division in Music Education (2021, Routledge), co-editor of The Politics of Diversity in Music Education (2021, Springer) and co-editor of Music, Education, and Religion: Intersections and Entanglements (2019, Indiana University Press).

Notes

1 Warren, 5 May 2023.

2 Warren, 10 May 2023.

3 Sean, 5 May 2023.

4 Sean, 12 May 2023.