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Many re-entry programs focus on employment and housing but overlook the lasting trauma incarceration produces.

Creative work may help people rebuild identity, emotional control, and a sense of purpose after incarceration.

Controlled trials suggest arts therapies in forensic care may ease symptoms and improve functioning.

Midway through the 2024 film "Sing Sing," a group of men rehearses a play in a classroom at a maximum-security prison in New York (Kwedar, 2024). Some of the actors learned their craft while they were incarcerated. They are alumni of Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA), the theater program the film portrays, and on screen they play versions of themselves.

RTA makes a striking claim about what happens after its participants go home: only around 5% return to prison (ABC7 New York, 2022). Nationally, 27% of people released from prison are reincarcerated within three years, down from 35% for those released in 2008 (Council of State Governments [CSG] Justice Center, 2024). The national figure is moving in the right direction. RTA’s figure suggests the arts may be reaching people in ways standard rehabilitation misses.

One possibility is that creative engagement addresses barriers conventional re-entry programs tend to overlook: trauma, a disrupted sense of self, and strained emotional capacity. The idea is promising, and the research behind it is still young.

What Prison Leaves Behind

The past two decades have brought new investment in re-entry, including the Second Chance Act of 2008, which funded education, mental health care, and substance use treatment for people leaving prison (CSG Justice Center, 2024). Attending to these needs is valuable; however, far less attention goes to what years inside do to a person’s mind and body. “The legal system, and incarceration more specifically, produces a legacy of intergenerational trauma and health harms,” says Dr. Rebecca Fix, an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Instead of addressing the traumatic circumstances that led many to incarceration, prisons exacerbate those harms.”

In a study of about 4,000 incarcerated men, 44.7% reported physical trauma in childhood (Wolff & Shi, 2012). Current rates of post-traumatic stress disorder are roughly five times more common among men in prison than in the general population, and about eight times more common among women (Baranyi et al., 2018). Experiences in prison typically perpetuate this trauma and distress. Victimization, solitary confinement, and coercion experienced in prison are each associated with PTSD (Piper & Berle, 2019). Among people released after long sentences, researchers have identified a lasting cluster of symptoms that includes chronic distrust, difficulty making decisions, and trouble sustaining relationships (Liem & Kunst, 2013). Poet Reginald Dwayne Betts was incarcerated at 16 and spent 14 months in solitary confinement. His collection Felon traces how that time follows a person long after release (Betts, 2019). These are the very capacities people need to rebuild their lives at home, work, and in their families, and........

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