Sounding Lockdown: Singing in Administrative Segregation at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women

Co-written by a music scholar and a returned citizen who spent twenty-two years at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, this chapter describes and theorizes the use of the voice in the architectural, social, and acoustic space of lockdown, the prison within the prison. Music can interrupt a cycle of mental illness that develops within the architecture of isolation and amid the soundscape of suffering. This personal account of suffering two full years in lockdown will pull together work from the disciplines of sound studies and criminology.