The California Arts Council has released the findings of a needs assessment and process and impact evaluation of the state agency’s Arts in Corrections program.
The report, Flowers Grown in Concrete: Exploring the Healing Power of the Arts for People Experiencing Incarceration—demonstrates three major findings for California’s prison-based arts programming and instruction, with the objective of enhancing and expanding student-centered rehabilitation and reintegration efforts in the future.
Authored by a research team at the University of Wisconsin Justice Lab, in partnership with Dr. Linda Burton, Dean of the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, the report “exemplifies the power of the arts to remind us of our shared humanity, especially during this global pandemic,” said Arts in Corrections Program Manager Mariana Moscoso. “Alternative programming let our participants know we were thinking of them and that their lives and creativity mattered, even if we are not physically there to provide that programming.”
The complete report can be viewed online at this link. |