Educational Media Reviews Online

Conducting Hope introduces us to the men of the East Hill Singers, the only prison choir in the U.S. that performs outside prison walls. The group’s membership is made up of inmates (twenty-two as of this filming) at Lansing Correctional Facility in Lansing, Kansas, and about as many area community volunteers, several of whom are former inmates. The group gives several concerts each year. The film is half documentary, half excerpts from the choir’s performance at a nearby church. Interview clips with prisoners are interspersed with rehearsal footage of the group as they prepare for an upcoming concert. We get to know several of the inmates quite well—they talk frankly about why they are in prison, what they do as inmates, if they have a job, why they participate in the choir, and how they feel before performances.

Director Kirk Carson, who has a day job as a contractor with the Department of Defense and is also an opera singer, takes a practical, uncondescending approach to being a conductor of a prison choir. In addition to the emotional experiences the inmates get from the group, Carson sees the choir as an opportunity for the inmates to work as a team and to prepare themselves for presenting in front of people, experiences that will help them when they rejoin society and apply for jobs. Prison staff who are interviewed in the documentary also affirm that constructive programs like the East Hill Singers help inmates have a more positive experience in prison. Inmates and community volunteers who are interviewed credit the unique powers of music over and over, saying, “I love doing this. My life has been so rich and so full, and music has been a big part of it,” and “When you’re in prison, you’re treated like an object. And music helped me to escape that.”

The successful program is not without challenges. The community singers and the inmates rehearse separately, and Carson confessed to having some anxiety in not being able to bring the two groups together until the day of the concert. For a couple years, state budget cuts prevented the performances from occurring outside the prison because the facility could not afford the travel expenses; fortunately, prison staff decided to volunteer their time and the concerts resumed. But after watching even 30 seconds of the performance excerpts it is obvious to anyone with a beating heart that the choir has become not only a central experience for the inmates, but it also serves as a vital connection between the inmates and the community, particularly their families. At the very end we get some “where are they now?” updates on some of inmates we hear a lot from during the doc. The best part of the production is the de-brief that Carson has with the inmates after the concert, in which the inmates share their thoughts and feelings about the performance. The scene—and much of the performance itself, where the inmates are able to create music with others and connect with their families off prison grounds—is something you need to experience for yourself. Highly recommended.