When Kenyatta Emmanuel was sentenced to decades in Sing Sing Correctional Facility in 1995, he accepted responsibility, but knew he couldn’t undo the pain he’d caused. What he could do was choose how to spend the years ahead.

Kenyatta turned to music. With a small Casio CT-S410 keyboard, he pieced together melodies that became a language for reckoning with the past and growing toward the future. “In that cell with a little rinky dink Casio keyboard, it was enough to form a new alphabet for me,” he said. Convicted of killing a taxi driver in 1996, when he was 21, Kenyatta was serious about finding a new way forward while he paid for his crime. Through Musicambia, music became more than expression — it became a vehicle for true transformation and responsibility.

Kenyatta is a natural fit for Musicambia, a nonprofit that brings music education into prisons across the country. Rooted in the belief that dignity is what drives transformation, the group offers incarcerated people the chance to learn instruments, compose, and perform together. The community, purpose, and confidence they build along the way can help improve outcomes for many of those in the justice system, especially once they return home.

Musicambia shines a spotlight on a complicated dynamic within the criminal justice system: To keep people from returning to prison and set them on a path toward living a life of purpose involves restoring their inner dignity, which in the case of Musicambia, happens through music. But core to an effective criminal justice system that keeps communities safe is ensuring the dignity of victims and their loved ones as well.

That’s why efforts like Musicambia are part of a broader approach to criminal justice, one that not only removes barriers to opportunity for people with criminal records and believes in second chances, but one that ensures equal justice for all, protects public safety, and makes victims whole.

“To compose good, honest songwriting … [I had to be] honest about who I was,” he said. “When you’re guilty of a crime, there’s a liberty in taking accountability.”

He walked into Rikers with a viola. He came out with a vision for change.

Nathan Schram, a lifelong musician and child of a military family, had always relied on music to build connections. He knew its power went far beyond performance. Finding how to put that belief into practice wasn’t obvious.

Inspired by his brother, a public defender, Schram began visiting prisons like Rikers Island to perform and teach. The contrast was striking. In some international facilities, Schram said, there were “really dark places where there were bullet holes in the wall. Then, when I’d go from the general prison into the music school, there was a really stark contrast.”

“People were smiling, dancing, and talking about how lucky they were to have this opportunity — how they’d found a deeper pride and belief in themselves that they could carry with them beyond the facility,” Schram said. For him, the lesson is clear: Rehabilitation isn’t just about addressing what went wrong in the past, but about cultivating a sense of worth and potential for the future. “Most people will return to society,” he explained. “If we want safer communities, we need to make sure they leave with a stronger sense of their own value and the ability to contribute.”

In 2013, Schram founded Musicambia on the belief that lasting transformation comes from nurturing the dignity that every person already has. Today, the group offers regular lessons in nearly a dozen instruments, along with composition and ensemble performance. The real impact comes from treating music as a concrete tool for growth — a way for people to practice discipline, creativity, and collaboration while building confidence in their own value.

“If you just sit someone down and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to teach you anti-violence,’ [it’s too overwhelming],” Schram said. “Instead, you can say, ‘Hey, we’re going to teach you music. And by the way, it’s going to teach you how to love yourself more. It’s going to teach you how to collaborate with your colleagues. It’s going to teach you how to face a challenge and make something beautiful out of it.’”

For Kenyatta, music was a direct way to learn and grow in crucial ways that would be needed to have a successful life outside of prison.

“I needed to be vulnerable, to do the type of self-examination that is necessary to compose good, honest songwriting,” he said. “Examining myself and my motivations, learning to forgive people, learning to forgive myself.”

Through facilitating self-reflection, accountability, communication, individuality, creativity, and more, music can help incarcerated persons. That can be transformational.

Since its inception, Musicambia has worked at 10 different prisons — both maximum- and medium-security — consistently across California, Kansas, and New York, hosting 125 incarcerated musicians during the 2023–2024 season alone. Those participants composed 56 original songs during their time with the organization.

“Prison takes away not just freedom, but community,” Schram said. “Music rebuilds it. The more we cultivate this community, the stronger it becomes — cutting across racial and gang lines. People tell us all the time, ‘I never would have talked to this guy if it wasn’t for Musicambia.’” Studies show that music programming can have powerful effects for building community bonds and promoting improved mental health among individuals.

The fact is that 95% of incarcerated people will eventually leave prison and return to their communities. Currently, about 70% of those 95% end up being rearrested within five years of release.

That’s where the Cambia Collective comes in. The collective is a public-facing ensemble made up of Musicambia alumni and teaching artists. By creating a space for group practices and live performances of original songs written in prison, the Cambia Collective fills a big gap that many recently incarcerated people feel.

Once back outside of prison, Kenyatta said, “You’ve been gone so long. To form a life, to gain employment, to find housing, to build community, to navigate the world — it’s like, ‘What just happened?’”

The Cambia Collective gave Kenyatta community, structure, and direction upon his release in 2019. While rebuilding his life could be daunting, continuing to perform in an ensemble provided “support, and a tool to help not just navigate but survive, to come out whole, to come out healed,” he said. “Music and art creates expression and community collaboration. In the same way it helped us navigate and heal [in prison], it’s necessary out here too. It’s necessary for everybody, frankly, but it’s especially necessary for those of us who have used it as a tool for so many years.”

Music helps people rewrite their story

Kenyatta left prison on October 21, 2019. That same night, he performed at his first concert with Musicambia Teaching Artists and Alumni at Carnegie Hall.

“Talk about a nice venue, right?” he said. “Someone was saying, ‘Wow, you seem so comfortable in front,’ and I’m like, ‘This is only a couple hundred people. I was in the auditorium for hundreds of incarcerated people before.’”

After leaving prison, Kenyatta embarked on a totally new life, one that centered around music. Since 2019, he has worked as a professional musician and instructor and was the artist-in-residence at Columbia University’s Initiative for a Just Society.

“This is a life that I’ve wondered if it could be possible,” he said. “They said yes, it is possible.”

But as the organization has grown, it has begun to rethink what success looks like. After originally aiming to spread to all 50 states within the next 20 years, Schram realized that even more important than growing in scale is the ability to listen to and engage meaningfully with those it serves. Now, Musicambia is instead focused on building deep relationships with the facilities it already works with and making sure that its existing programs are robust.

Musicambia participants in 2023–2024 overwhelmingly cited feeling increased belief in their potential, that their talents were seen and appreciated, and that they felt more valuable to their community. 

“Anybody who walks into our programs knows it’s successful,” Schram said. “That people are smiling, that there is an instant community that’s created, that is undeniable. … [Success] looks like joy. We do surveys [that ask], ‘What did your life look like going into this program, and what does it look like now? What were your beliefs about yourself before, and what are your beliefs about yourself after?’ We have quantitative demonstrations of how successful we are, but really the proof is in the music we make. It’s in the faces of the people that are making this music.”

Kenyatta’s latest single was released a year ago. The more people that hear it, the more the potential of music to intervene and change the outcomes for other people can be seen — or more accurately, heard.

“If everyone in the world saw what we were doing in person, we would be unstoppable,” Schram said. “It’s that powerful.”

Musicambia is supported by Stand Together Foundation, which empowers individuals to reach their full potential through community-driven change. Learn more about Stand Together’s efforts to build strong and safe communities and explore ways you can partner with us.