via Jeroslyn JoVonn
Would possibly 7, 2024
How the United Kingdom’s “Free Flow” radio lets in inmates countrywide to join via inventive voice.
Meet Woman Unchained, the host in the back of the UK’s “Free Flow” radio display, which permits inmates national to apply and blow their own horns their rapping and poetry talents.
The award-winning poet, creator, and broadcaster helmed the display for London’s Nationwide Jail Radio (NPR), a station simplest to be had to His Majesty’s inmates, The Parent studies. Every pace, “Free Flow” entertains 1000’s of listeners who track in to listen to Woman Unchained play games a order of hip-hop instrumentals to which they get the prospect to write down track and spoken guarantee items.
For the ultimate six years, listeners had been ready to dial in and freestyle into an answering device that Woman Unchained replays next and deals her comments. Along with the track and ability show off, Woman Unchained, a former inmate herself, stocks recommendation and recommendations on learn how to manufacture a crime-free hour via inventive voice and sure residing.
“It’s a community of listeners who are going through personal journeys,” Woman Unchained says. “Sometimes people aren’t even rapping. They’re just calling in to say: ‘Big up the guy who called in last because I felt what he was saying.’ That for me is everything.”
The display places the United Kingdom’s just about 90,000 inmates in reference to every alternative via track and exemplifies how generation and track developments are paving lanes for sustainable, healing, and rehabilitative actions for the jail population. The callers, most commonly male inmates, percentage their rhymes about their private stories together with drug habit, parental relationships, and youth injuries, together with guarantees of improving themselves and inspiring others going via in a similar way difficult statuses.
Woman Unchained is making plans to leave a reside spoken guarantee novel of the 20-minute grasp observe the display generated from inmates calling in all the way through the United Kingdom’s Unlit Historical past Era in October to percentage their verses to Tupac Shakur’s “Changes.” The groundbreaking result of “Free Flow” have garnered the display silver in the most productive business partnership division at ultimate month’s Audio and Radio Business awards, bronze for best possible track leisure display in 2021, and 11 nominations at this month’s awards.
“I get messages all the time saying: ‘I’m out – thanks for playing my voice.’ We recognize that there is a massive community of people returning to society who had the show as their lifeline,” Woman Unchained says.
“My dream is that the people who are coming out are able to build a new narrative for what ex-offenders look like and sound like. It’s the importance of showing a different style of rapping, of telling your story without adding that glorification of what you’ve done on the roads, which could lead to you being connected to an offense because you’ve rapped about it in your bars. It’s about trying to change the narrative. Saying: ‘You don’t have to continue doing road when you get out. Now you’ve got a new community in Free Flow: come spit some bars and be creative.’”
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