New York City musician and visual artist Fury Young wasn't planning on starting a record label for incarcerated musicians when he began to reach out to different prisons across the country in 2013. Mostly, the artist just wanted to see if, inspired by the activism he saw at Occupy Wall Street and reading Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow," he'd be able to find enough musicians to work with him on a single concept album about mass incarceration, featuring artists who were living it.
At first, progress was dire.
"I found a list of music programs in prisons across the country, and just calling and looking into one after another, around 50 percent of them were already defunct," said Young. "And the ones that were still around were understaffed, underfunded, and the vast majority of them were just doing solely religious music."