Getting to the prison’s administrative offices requires negotiating a maze of brightly lit, white-brick hallways, being buzzed through a series of clanging metal doors, and passing by several holding cells filled with bored prisoners. Here, just down the hall from the prison chapel, Dennis Sobin shuffles into a small, windowless office with a stack of documents and music books clutched under his arm, a tattered orange jumpsuit hanging loosely on his gaunt frame, and a pair of black dress loafers on his feet. Sobin has been at the D.C. jail for more than a month and isn’t up for release until mid-April, but on this afternoon, his bright mood stands in stark contrast to the oppressive dreariness all around him. He drops the books on a desk and holds up a thick sheaf of handwritten notes.

“I’ll show you some things I’m doing here, just to show you the volume of what I’ve accomplished already,” he says, running a thumb through his papers. “This is 300 pages of a book I’m writing called Artists in Prison: Understanding and Helping Them. I’m going to do a second book while I’m here called From Prison to the Kennedy Center: Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners in the National Spotlight.”

Sobin, 65, has spent the last six years running the Prisons Foundation, an organization he founded to promote music and arts programs

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for inmates. He conceived it while incarcerated in Florida and Virginia from 1992 to 2003 after being found guilty on charges of sexual performance of a child, racketeering, and bank fraud, all of which he denies to this day.

“I got there and said, ‘Now I’m here, what do I want to do?’” When Sobin speaks, he leans sharply forward. His eyes, sunk deep into his head behind a bulbous nose, dart around vigorously. “I had always been a guitar strummer and loved music, but said, ‘This is an opportunity to learn seriously.’ There were lifers there who were able to duplicate Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.” Sobin dedicated himself to guitar in prison, recording a CD of his songs there and giving lessons to other inmates. He noticed the calming effect music had on otherwise troubled souls. “If you’re creating music, you’re dealing with personal issues. The blues and rock’n’roll are a way of expressing your feelings and resolving your problems. Your whole personality can change.”

From behind bars, Sobin finished a memoir, Doing Time in Waltz Time: A Memoir of Ten Years in Prison Playing and Teaching Music, and upon his release, started the Prisons Foundation, on whose board sits activist-writer Paul Krassner and historian Howard Zinn. Kevin Horrocks, the foundation’s resource director, did two years in prison and was inspired by Sobin’s tale.

“He’s the best living example of the ways art, and in this case music, can salvage people,” says Horrocks.

Among other activities, the Prisons Foundation sells the artwork of prisoners through the Prison Art Gallery in D.C. and puts on an annual

Sobin at the Community for Creative NonViolence, 2003

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show at the Kennedy Center featuring music, poetry, and drama written and performed by prisoners and ex-prisoners. Sobin has also played numerous benefit gigs in conjunction with organizations such as Jail Guitar Doors, founded by British agit-folkie Billy Bragg, which donates musical instruments to prisons. Sobin is currently serving six months for violating an order of protection filed by his son, who works at City Hall in D.C. Sobin was arrested, he says, when he came to City Hall to testify at a public hearing on alternatives to incarceration.

“I’ve actually written an operetta while I’ve been here called Busted at City Hall, based on my case,” he says. “It’s a comedy because what happened to me, you just wouldn’t believe it was being taken seriously.”

BECAUSE OF THE diffuse nature of U.S. prisons (in addition to a federal system, there are multiple corrections departments in every state, as well as city and county jails), music programs vary wildly from facility to facility, based largely on staff priorities, funding, equipment, and security concerns. A few prisons offer opportunities nearly on par with college music programs; many others have nothing at all.

The evening after visiting Sobin at the D.C. jail, I meet a singer-songwriter named Joe Shade at an office on K Street that the Prisons Foundation shares with the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). Prints of inmate artwork lean against walls tacked with newspaper articles and desks piled with issues of High Times. In the late ’70s, Shade played guitar in the Sic Fucks, a forgotten New York punk band. He met Sobin in 2007 when, after seeing a website for Jail Guitar Doors, he contacted him about raising money to donate guitars to local prisons.

“Dennis said, ‘You just need to start calling prisons,’” says Shade. “I got a lot of pushback. Jails would say, ‘We don’t accept guitars here. These guys would rip the strings off and choke each other.’ ” But Shade eventually found takers and began organizing benefit shows. “You can stand on the street corner, sing protest songs, and rail against the government, or you can do something at some level that can actually have an impact.”

Bragg, who has brought musical instruments to more than 20 British prisons since starting Jail Guitar Doors in 2007, says, “Musicians particularly understand how an instrument can help you transcend your surroundings, to find that small, still place where you can process problems in a nonconfrontational way. You build on that by encouraging prisoners to

72 MAY 2009 / SPIN.COM: I T’S MAGICALLY DELICIOUS!