What Tuning In means for Mothers in Prison

Jane Lings - Changing Tunes Trustee, Music Therapist, and former Musician-in-Residence at HMP Eastwood Park - recently wrote an article for Lapidus International, a membership organisation which supports writing for wellbeing.

We are sharing some of the article below as Jane discusses the ‘Tuning In’ project and how mothers in prison are supported to write and play songs for their children.

Prisons have been in the news a great deal recently. Buildings in disrepair, massive overcrowding and shocking increases in prisoner self-harm and suicide. The prisons minister, James Timpson, describes prisons, especially for women, as being a ’disaster’.

For over 30 years, Changing Tunes has been steadily developing trauma-informed music-making sessions both within the justice system and post-release. Sessions are underpinned by a non-judgemental approach, relationship building, support and encouragement, and participants often describe the physical, social and psychological benefits as ’life-changing’.

The ’Tuning In’ (TI) project is a relatively new and focused initiative for Changing Tunes, offering mothers a 10-session course of therapeutic music and songwriting, with the possibility of creating and recording their own songs for their children.

During previous prison visits, I noticed evidence of the women’s harsh lives and fragile mental states… I had yet to comprehend that their invisible dependent children were now victims of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE). Parental imprisonment creates an estimated fivefold increase in ACEs for children. There are strong intergenerational patterns with prisoners themselves being victims of family breakdown, neglect, sexual abuse, domestic violence and trauma.

The project’s goal was to support mothers to write and play songs for their children, to help repair bonds fractured through separation. Prison is experienced by many as dismantling and dehumanising. Writing songs for their children can provide significant therapeutic benefit but necessitates psychological resilience. With therapeutic support, this reflective, creative process can be, as described by one TI participant, an unexpected ’blessing’ that facilitates positive change.

Jane at a Changing Tunes concert.

A vignette
We collect you from your wing and walk towards the music room, unlocking, re-locking and checking each gate and door on the way. We sit in a semi-circle to begin. At first your anxiety is evident. We ask: ’What would you like us to know about you?’ You reply, at first a few words, then a torrent.

Together we talk, listen, play, sing, explore, share, write down spoken phrases, the music facilitating the building of trust and relationship more quickly than words alone. From the first spoken phrases and sentences, jotted down in short lines, a song begins to emerge and grow. Each week you add more painful detail and nuance to your story.

The final song is like a letter to yourself, to remind yourself not to return here.

Love from Me
…I don’t know how to begin
But I do know something
This is not a way to be living…
Just think of the support I have now
Just think of how far I’ve come…

In week 9, recordings are made of the now four songs created. Prison rules state that those recordings cannot be kept by you in your cell, but the songs are lodged in your heart and mind and cannot be erased.

You share that you are leaving behind the unspoken guilt, shame and grief… You talk of leaving with self-worth and hope and importantly a sense that intergenerational patterns can change.

Music is an extraordinary medium, creating an unconscious, felt sense of safety and trust. Over the cycles of the project the songs tell of loss, identity, love, hope, sorrow, grief, regret, understanding. Talking, playing, being heard, have enabled a process of framing previously unspoken and unprocessed thoughts and experiences which may underlie behaviours and crimes.

Our experience is that Tuning In provides an oasis within a parched landscape. Here in this space, seeds of hope and change can grow or take root.

“It takes a lot of strain off your heart.”

I have been humbled by working alongside musicians Anna, Isie, Livvy and Naomi and by working with women who have had the courage to enter this process of change and have dared to take the first small steps.

These words were first published in Issue Six of Lapidus Magazine, September 2025.