Changing the Landscape of Incarceration

Jeffrey Bohn, Founder and Executive Director of Shining Light, is an entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in starting and operating for-profit businesses and non-profit organizations. 

In 1996, Bohn founded Shining Light and has developed working relationships with prisons, jails, shelters, and rehab centers in 25 states and Puerto Rico. For the past five years, Bohn has been developing a comprehensive arts and well-being program designed to revolutionize the way incarceration in America works from the inside out. He has facilitated research partnerships with UPenn’s Applied Positive Psychology graduate program and NYU’s Marron Institute to document the impact of Shining Light’s work.

Bohn received his B.S. in Music Education and went on to perform as a saxophonist with George Burns, Chita Rivera, and Patti Page. Bohn was co-owner of J.P. Donmoyer, Inc., a regional trucking company, from 1989 to 2014, when he successfully sold to investors.

The US incarcerates more people – 2.3. million – than any country in the world. 95% of incarcerated people will be released someday (Vera Institute), but 79% will be rearrested within six years of their release (Bureau of Justice Statistics).

We commit to offering innovative performing arts and well-being development opportunities to incarcerated people for the duration of their sentence. Incarcerated people join our program through our Impact Workshop, a two-week performing arts intensive, led by professional artists, that culminates in a large-scale production for 500 of their incarcerated peers and facility staff. Shining Light returns for regular follow-up visits, a three-day Creative Intensive, and mails regular Interactive Newsletters to participants. We are also about to launch a long-term, peer-led character development program.

We provide truly rehabilitative opportunities to incarcerated people across the US, over an extended period of time, to increase their well-being and success during and post-incarceration.

As mentioned above, the US incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, and high recidivism rates contribute to a rotating prison door that decimates communities, wastes billions of government dollars, and perpetuates racial injustice. The average state spends over $33,000 annually to incarcerate a single inmate (Vera Institute), yet only $11,700 per high school student (Governing.com). In addition, The Sentencing Project found in 2016 that there are 5 African American people incarcerated for every 1 white person in the US prison system.

The US incarceration system is built largely on a punitive model, and offers limited opportunities for meaningful rehabilitative opportunities. Our programs are experiential, intensive, and others-focused. We provide something more dynamic and demanding than a classroom experience, and all our programming is geared towards empowering our participants to see how they can serve and help those around them. Innovative prison programs are rare, and, where they do exist, are clustered near urban areas. We work predominantly in rural state prisons in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and South Carolina with very little arts access or access to other creative programs. 

Our project takes a holistic, experiential approach to prison programming that is truly rehabilitative. We commit to working with an individual for their entire period of incarceration, offering varied opportunities - always experiential, challenging, and others-focused – to engage people in increasing their well-being and that of those around them. 

We begin with the Impact Workshop, a large-scale, two-week intensive that binds together a team of 30 incarcerated men or women to present an original, 50-minute production for their peers on SL’s stage, in collaboration with SL’s professional guest artists. From here, SL holds one, six, and 12-month follow up visits with incarcerated participants, to increase and encourage engagement in personal and relational changes that 90% of participants report began at the Workshop. These participants receive SL’s monthly engagement newsletter, which includes creative and well-being prompts to be completed and returned to SL. Participants will also have the option to participate in an 8-week Follow-Up Course focused on character development, which SL is piloting in July.                                                                           

This program process repeats in each host prison every other year – on the “off” year, SL hosts a 3-day Creative Intensive designed as an additional creative opportunity for both former and new participants.

Our project is focused on improving the well-being and post-release outcomes for incarcerated people in the US. 

A 2009 study on the causes and correlates of parole success and failure found little evidence that job acquisition or housing were significant parole challenges. Rather, “The greatest problem for parolees was managing themselves in a prosocial manner while facing demands from their environment” (Bucklen & Zajac). Our program addresses this need directly by helping incarcerated people return to society with new skills to face obstacles with a prosocial response, a response that they have practiced in real life through overcoming intentional challenges and obstacles in our arts program, in a supportive environment. 

Shining Light has over 20 years of experience working in prisons, jails, youth detention centers, and rehab centers across the nation. We conduct evaluations about our programs with all participants at 1, 6, and 12-month junctures, to evaluate effectiveness and gather their feedback. Collection and review of participant feedback is what led to the development of our 3-day Creative Intensive. 

We are also in the process of finalizing an Advisory Board of released participants, to consult with Shining light on program design and development.

Incarcerated people are one of the most frequently forgotten and “left behind” groups in the US. Common social narratives posit that this is a group of people who “deserve” to be where they are. This perpetuates a mentality of removal and punishment, often for lengths of time disproportionate to the crime committed. We are offering them experiential opportunities to improve their wellbeing and elevate their future success.

Our program also elevates understanding between incarcerated people, incarcerated and correctional staff, and incarcerated people and society, through giving voice to their stories in creative, engaging, original ways both within prison and without. 

Shining Light began in 1996 as a rural youth choir to provide youth with experiences that would expand their perspective and impact their lives. Shining Light’s first performance in a Chicago juvenile detention center in 1999 opened my eyes to the problem of mass incarceration. I was shocked by the lack of resources and arts in the facility, and amazed at the incredible impact our performance had on the teens there. As I learned more about the criminal justice system, I saw an urgent need for rehabilitative programming and sought to fill it using my experience as a businessman and artist. For the next 15 years, Shining Light continued to hold annual performance tours to over 50 correctional facilities across the country.

We shifted to working with college-age, pre-professional artists in 2013, and after piloting the Impact Workshop in 2015, shifted again to work with professional performing artists who offered more of the creative and teaching skills we needed to maximize our new program’s impact. The Impact Workshop, which I developed with our Program Director Kelly Enck, was piloted in partnership with the Philadelphia Department of Prisons, in response to requests from facility staff for direct work with their inmates. 

Simply put, the US criminal justice system is not just, and this should be upsetting to every person hoping to live in a just society. When my eyes were opened to the millions of men, women, and children, stuck in this system’s cycle, I wanted to offer an opportunity that would bring real change to their lives and impact the entire atmospheres of prisons and jails across the country. The way we do "justice" as a society is not working. I want to work at changing it from inside prison walls.

The arts have impacted my life dramatically, and I have seen that they have incredible untapped potential, particularly when paired with the meaning-making of positive psychology or spirituality, to change outcomes for incarcerated people. 

I do this work because I believe we will see our society flourish when we actively promote the well-being and flourishing of its most marginalized members. 

This work fuses my skills and life experience in a way that is both fulfilling and effective. After getting my degree in music education, I worked as a saxophonist with artists such as Patti Page, Rita Moreno, and Chita Rivera. I left life as a professional musician to help run my family’s trucking company. I became President in 1985, co-owner in 1989, and oversaw growth of the company from $2 million to $30 million in revenue before selling it in 2014. 

I bring my mind as an artist who believes deeply in the power of excellent art as both restorative and as a vehicle for societal change and my experience in business to running Shining Light. We have developed a replicable model, and have connections across the country from our 20-year history who would like to bring our program to their facilities. Since the 2000s, Shining Light has received unprecedented permission to bring in large-scale, professional-grade stage equipment for its performances and programs. As discussed below, we have also received rare permissions to correspond with inmates in our new distanced program that we have developed in response to COVID-19. These are indicative of the critical trust we have built with prison staff, which position us for reliable expansion and future success.

With the invaluable support of MIT Solve and the Elevate Prize, we will be able to double the reach of our program, impacting over 10,000 incarcerated people and 12-15 prison facilities in the next three years.

Prisons closed their doors to all outside organizations in March, as they seek to protect their vulnerable populations, who are unable to social distance in crowded prison facilities that rely on close, shared living space.

However, in this new, nationwide absence of rehabilitative programming inside, incarcerated people face drastically increased fears for their own health and safety and for that of their family outside, making prisons more volatile places than ever. No visitors or family are currently permitted in the prisons in which we work. Video-conferencing visits are limited. Most facilities are on lockdown, which severely restricts or eliminates inmates’ movement.

To ensure these people are not forgotten and left without opportunities for personal development, we pivoted in late March 2019 to a distanced program. This involved working diligently with state-level correctional staff for permissions to mail to our former participants, which is generally forbidden for outside organizations. We are now sending a monthly Interactive Newsletter; conducting remote follow-up with past program teams; and we are producing creative work submitted to us by participants, to send a full-length video back to the facilities we work in to be aired on their TV channel for over 15,000 incarcerated people. 

I believe a great deal of my leadership ability lies in my persistence and perseverance despite obstacles.

On January 25, our staff was preparing to begin our first Workshop in the state of South Carolina the next day. At 9pm that night, an administrator from the host prison called to tell me that they had just locked-down the prison indefinitely due to an outbreak of the flu. 

I called our South Carolina contact, asking him to find another prison that would still host the Workshop – with just one day’s notice!

By Tuesday noon, the situation looked hopeless. But then my contact called and told us that Ridgeland Correctional Institution had shown interest. We I immediately drove to Ridgeland and worked out the logistics with the staff. On Wednesday at 8am we got started. 

Our original plans, with five months of planning, had been to go to Allendale Correctional institution, a model institution with an abundance of programs. Instead we were directed to a prison with limited programming and some struggles with violence, with less than 24 hours of planning. Nevertheless, the program was a great success and is opening many more doors in the state.

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We are merging the powerful research of positive psychology, defined as "the scientific study of the strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive," together with the arts to create a dynamic program in which incarcerated people can engage meaningfully with their environment in a creative way that leaves them inspired to further change.

We create a healthy counter-culture within each prison that hosts our program. This counter-culture fights damaging narratives of isolation, despair, and violence with narratives of community, purpose, and dignity. Our program creates a shared meaning, particularly strong among our participants, but also among thousands of incarcerated people in the audiences at our performances. We are subversively seeking to change the negative relationships that shape the US incarceration experience: we seek to renew healthy relationships between our participants, within themselves, and between correctional staff and the inmates in their care. 

This last relationship is particularly powerful and often overlooked in working for systemic change. Few programs seek to influence the negative views of inmates pervasive among prison superintendents, wardens, deputies, and correctional officers, views which breed distrust, violence, and isolation. Yet it is these people who influence the daily realities of incarceration and who hold the most power over what a person's prison sentence could look like. We focus on reinvigorating their views by showing them the incredible potential in their population, and giving them an opportunity to have a shared positive experience with the inmates, as they watch them perform and thrive in a demanding program.

We provide a holistic performing arts and well-being development program to incarcerated people.

Our activities include creation of original artistic work, from participants' own stories; team-building and "play" exercises; small group discussions around the arts, personal development, and well-being; and final performances or sharing of artistic work. Development of these activities over the last five years have been developed based on evidence-based research conducted by the University of Florida, Brene Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and in our own studies of our programs.

These inputs generate four key short term outcomes:  

1. Participants develop prosocial skills and associations:

            a. Confidence/Self-worth (affirming or increasing understanding of inherent value vs. value based on external feedback or circumstance)

            b. Empathy (ability to see other people’s value and perspectives)

            c. Resilience (belief in one’s ability to face and overcome obstacles with self-control) 

            d. New positive associations built on shared attitudes, values, & beliefs 

2. Explore or develop a spiritual or meaning foundation

3. Develop self-leadership and capacity to be a positive influence

4. Develop positive community and culture throughout the entire prison

90% of our participants report on our post-program surveys that they grow personally and relationally across a variety of indicators.

Medium-term outcomes include improved relationships between inmates and prison staff, as measured through anecdotal comments from participants and facility staff. Improved inmate relationships with themselves and with others result in reduced in-prison infraction rates. One deputy warden of a state prison with over 2,000 men told us, "You make this place safer." 

Other arts in prison programs have found great success in these areas: the Actors Gang, a California organization that runs theater workshops in correctional facilities, found an 89% drop in in-prison infractions for people who participated in their workshops (Huffington Post). Another study reported significant increases in inmates’ openness to new ideas and ability to get along well with others after participating in arts programming (Larry Brewster, Justice Policy Journal, Vol 11).

Long-term outcomes include a reduced recidivism rate among our participants. We are currently investigating conducting our own formal study of recidivism rates in our program. 

We are currently serving 2,500 incarcerated people per year, both as program  participants (300 people) and performance audience members (2,200 people). We also interact with over 250 correctional staff annually who attend the final performances in our Impact Workshops. 

We want to triple our reach in the next five years, to reach over 900 regular participants, 7,500 audience members, and 750 correctional staff in 20 different state prisons annually. There are over 10 prisons in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and South Carolina, in addition to the 10 we currently work in, who would like to bring our program to their residents. We are unable to offer our program to them at this time due to a lack of funding.

Our one-year goals are still in flux, as we wait to see when and how prison facilities will be able to reopen to outside partner organizations after the COVID-19 pandemic. In one year, we would like to expand our new, distanced Character Development follow-up program to all 10 facilities in which we currently work. [This program is being piloted at a Pennsylvania state prison beginning in July 2020.] This would reach at least 300 men and women with this program, in addition to the creative submission and Interactive Newsletter programs we are currently running in all 10 prisons.

When we are able to return to in-person programming, we will need to leverage new funding sources to hire and train more staff members to sustain this growth.

Along with tripling our program's reach, it is our goal to maintain the program's integrity and effectiveness by hiring excellent staff and artists and training well to ensure the integrity of our program's replicability. We are seeking to expand our network of artists in the next five years, and as it expands, will identify key candidates from this pool to come on full-time staff with Shining Light in more directorial roles. 

In addition to their work with Shining Light, these artists and staff members act as advocates for the voices of incarcerated people in society. Our artists have performed at TEDx events, written and performed work about their experiences working with the people in Shining Light's program, and write articles for publications bringing the problems in the criminal justice system to light. Over the next five years, we want to develop a framework to support these efforts in a low-resource, high-impact way that empowers our artists and supports them as they advocate for the incarcerated out in society.

To accomplish our goals of growth and empowerment of artists, we need to  expand our budget by bringing more financial partners onto our team. We are  seeking grant funding from a number of sources who would not only fund our work, but support it with professional development and advising opportunities that would increase the sustainability of our growth and support our staff. 

Funding is the largest barrier. We work at a unique intersection of incarceration, arts, and well-being and it can be challenging to identify funders who share an interest in all three of these areas. Additionally, a greater number of social justice funders are focused on funding initiatives in urban areas. Although at least 30% of men and women incarcerated in state prisons come from and will return to urban areas, we face obstacles in finding funding to work in these state prisons, which are almost always located in rural areas without much available regional funding. 

The second potential barrier could be prison staff who are closed to innovative ways of serving their population. Working with a supportive, prison staff is critical to our work. Identifying partners who are open to our methods and willing to work to make our program happen over a long period of time can be challenging. 

To address our funding obstacles, we are seeking to approach large, national funders who would consider funding in rural areas. We have experienced success in receiving two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and want to leverage that trust they have placed in our organization to attract other large national funders.

A secondary and more grassroots way to overcome this barrier is to raise awareness about incarceration as a national issue, not just a regional one. When you incarcerate people far away from their home communities in urban areas, you cannot forget about them. 95% of incarcerated people will return to their home communities, and we want to advocate for funders and the general public to see these people as a part of their community throughout their incarceration, even though they may have been forcibly removed for a time from the urban community. Again, growing the advocacy ability and capacity of our artists is a key approach we see to accomplishing this.

To address potential barriers among correctional staff buy-in, we will seek recommendations and introductions from current facility hosts with whom we have worked over the last five years. One of our long-time board members, Edmund Duffy, is also a former Warden at Rikers Island, and brings a valuable network of correctional staff contacts. He was responsible for facilitating introductions to prisons in Ohio and South Carolina, with whom we began working in 2019.

We partner with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections since 2016, and with the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections and the South Carolina Department of Corrections since 2019.

Each prison provides rehearsal space, performance space, extra correctional staff, and assistance in participant recruitment. SL uses the following criteria to select facilities: the facility’s need, the strength of the pre-existing relationship, and their willingness to collaborate.

We are primarily funded by a number of private donors, both as annual and monthly supporters. This accounts for approximately 80% of our annual revenue. In recent years, our monthly supporters have increased as we place more emphasis in our marketing and communications on the importance of this type of support for our organization, and the importance of having a committed base of supporters who are energized regularly by our work. We have also increased investment in attracting large donors to support our work.

We have also put efforts in the last three years into increasing our grant funding, both from government and private funders. This accounts for approximately 15% of our annual revenue. We have received grant funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Connelly Foundation, and many others. 

The other 5% of our annual revenue is made up of miscellaneous income.

We would like to increase our grant funding to account for 30% of our revenue mix over the next five years, continue investing in our monthly giving program, and identify and address more major donors who would support annually at a level over $10,000.

• The National Endowment for the Arts: $20,000 grant from their Grants for Arts Projects program (formerly Art Works). Received April 2020.
• The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts: $5406 grant. Received September 2019.
• The Leonard and Virginia Safrit Family Fund: $5,000 grant. Received January 2020
• The John and Margaret Post Foundation: $5,000 grant. Received May 2020.

We are seeking $850,000 over the next 3 years to steadily increase our annual budget to support the growth and expansion of our program.

Our estimated 2020 expenses are $400,000.

The Elevate Prize would offer us valuable funding to expand our program and an even more valuable network of professional management and development services to help us sustain and continue to increase our organizational growth. We see The Elevate Prize as catapulting us forward in our work by giving our work recognition, funding, and support to increase its public visibility and interest around innovative ways to shape the US incarceration system. This prize would present invaluable opportunities for professional development to our current staff, and would help us to bring on new staff in a sustainable way that preserves the special culture of Shining Light.

Beyond benefiting the specific work of Shining Light, the marketing power offered by The Elevate Prize would be invaluable towards raising awareness about the problem of mass incarceration in the US and driving energy around finding innovative, counter-cultural solutions to ending it. We see ourselves as a positive leader innovating in this area, and would relish the opportunity to partner with The Elevate Prize team in invigorating society to not only get involved in our work, but to find their own ways to interact with changing the system in unique, effective, long-term ways.

We need help connecting to large funders and presenting our work to them in a compelling way. This would involve mentorship and coaching for myself as Executive Director and for our development staff. 

We want to expand our board to include greater diversity of experience and more active members. We see The Elevate Prize providing key support to our new Advisory Board, a group of formerly incarcerated individuals who have participated in our programs and now are advising us and the development of of our work. We are currently seeking funding to make these paid positions, which would offer an additional income stream for some recently incarcerated people who are building a new life outside. 

Within ourselves, we cannot reach a wide enough network. With marketing assistance from The Elevate Prize, we would be able to reach a much larger network to promote our work and justice for the incarcerated.