In the Early ’90s, the Lifers Group Tried to Warn Kids About the Perils of Prison
This essay is part of Redemption Songs, a limited-run newsletter that spotlights one song each week by incarcerated artists. Sign up now to get a new song each Sunday afternoon until September:
Listen if you like: The D.O.C., Ice-T, Public Enemy
My 1990s childhood was saturated with anti-crime campaigns like the D.A.R.E. drug prevention curriculum and McGruff, the cartoon dog who told us to “take a bite out of crime.” But nothing haunts my subconscious quite like the “Scared Straight” TV specials, which showed men at New Jersey’s Rahway State Prison berating and threatening kids with juvenile records. There was something undeniably exploitative about letting the public watch children — often Black boys — get terrified into behaving. And many studies later found this approach, if anything, actually increased crime.
But hear me out: I think the older men meant well. Some of the “Scared Straight” guys also joined a rap outfit called Lifers Group that managed to get music out on a Disney-owned label, Hollywood BASIC. In the 1991 video for this week’s song, “Belly of the Beast,” you can see they’re trying to scare you. But I also hear their desperation, as they try to push young men out of the oncoming path of the War on Drugs.
This summer, some of this music is available for the first time on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, thanks to Maxwell Melvins, who founded the group, and independent scholar Kwabena Slaughter.
Melvins was serving a life sentence for murder in the 1980s when he took charge of the Lifers Group Juvenile Awareness Program, a nonprofit organization inside Rahway that provided men for “Scared Straight.” But he didn’t like the idea of screaming at children. “We were watching videos on TV and seeing the kids were really trying to emulate the rappers, their style, their hair, their bling, their language,” he told me. “So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be a better way?’” Like many parents at the time, he worried that famous rap groups were glamorizing prison life.
Rahway’s administration had previously let in microphones for The Escorts, a 1970s singing group that made the case for second chances. While trying to raise money for his organization, Melvins met music producers and recruited younger men with rap skills. He told them about the anti-crime message he wanted them to convey, and “it was a laugh to them,” as he told Freer Records in a 2017 interview. But “then they start seeing these letters coming in from The Walt Disney Company.”
“Hardly anyone can’t relate to Mickey Mouse, even murderers and wardens,” Hollywood BASIC label executive David Funken-Klein told The Washington Post at the time. Funken-Klein brought producers and equipment into Rahway, along with director Penelope Spheeris, later of “Wayne’s World” fame. Her 30-minute documentary about the group, distributed by mail-order VHS, was nominated for a Grammy.
Melvins told me they never made much money given all the production costs, and their success led to vindictive behavior from officers and other prisoners. The group fell apart when he was moved to another prison, and because he didn’t have a life-without-parole sentence, he was released in 2012. He’s recently advised and released music with Freer Records, a label that specializes in music made behind bars.
The “Scared Straight” TV specials might have been a bad idea, and there is no way to measure the effects of Lifers Group’s music. But Melvins was an early innovator, searching for ways for people with long sentences to find purpose in steering young people from their own outcomes. (This idea would later get formalized in various prison programs across the country.) Slaughter, the scholar helping Melvins archive his music, documents and photos, told me, “It was a real social contribution at the time to say, I made a mistake, and I can help people not fall into the same trap.”
LINER NOTES
Artist: Lifers Group | Album: “Lifers Group” | Song: “Belly of the Beast” | Year: 1991 | Executive Producer: Funken-Klein | MCs: Aleem, Almighty L, Basil “B-Wise” Al-Kudair, Chuck X, Knowledge Born Allah, Nathan “Merciful” Moore, Original, Rocky D, Tarrell “Amazing G” Baker | Backing Vocals: Alonzo Evans, Alvin Marino, Horace Glenn, Joseph Thomas | Bass: Marvin “Peanut” Andrews | Trumpet: Kirk “Sadat” Walker | Rahway Lifers: Big Al, “Crazy” Chris Deluise, Goldie Boone, Maxwell Melvins, Muhammad, Tariq Commander | Engineer: Scotty “Hard” Harding | Mastered by: “Big Bass” Brian Gardner | Producer: Dr. Jam, Phaze 5 | Scratches: Mista Lawnge, 9.5