Draft:Maxwell Melvins

Maxwell Melvins (born May 2, 1960) is a formerly incarcerated music producer, poet, and social justice reformer known for using hip-hop music to teach at-risk youth to avoid committing crime. He was the founder of the Lifers Group music project which produced the first hip-hop album written and performed by incarcerated people.

Childhood
Maxwell Melvins was born in Camden, New Jersey. During his childhood the residents in Camden were struggling with poverty, unemployment, drugs, and crime. He was the fifteenth and youngest child of a struggling family, five of whom had been incarcerated.

The first time he was incarcerated occurred during his early teenage years. To get away from the troubles in his neighborhood he would often walk around the campus of the nearby Rutgers University, but the campus' Security Guards would not allow him to be there. In 1980 he was sentenced to 25 years to life for committing the accidental homicide of a close friend.

Entry into the Lifers Group
In 1987 Maxwell Melvins requested to be transferred to Rahway State Prison because he'd heard of the positive social change projects being led there by incarcerated groups. His transfer request was approved, and in 1988 he became a member of the Lifers Group, an organization founded in 1972 by incarcerated men at Rahway State Prison sentenced to twenty-five years to life. In 1976 the Lifers Group created the first ever Juvenile Awareness Program. Young people would be brought into the prison and put in a meeting room with life-sentenced residents. The residents would tell the horror stories of what life was like in prison, so that the youth would not become misled to thinking that incarceration was a glamorous symbol of urban social status. “Learn the truth at the expense of our sorrow” was one of their pedagogical adages, along with the admonition to “help keep our membership low.” Their curriculum was referred to as "scared straight," which is a term that became a standard part of the discussion of educating youth to avoid criminal behavior. In 1978 Scared Straight became the title of the award-winning documentary that highlighted the work of the Lifers Group.

How It Started and How It Stopped
In 1990 Maxwell Melvins noticed that the at-risk youth in the Juvenile Awareness Program, while waiting in line for their transportation, would be free-styling or singing popular rap songs. Melvins came up with the idea for the Lifers Group to create a rap album to help convey their message to the youth. The lead administrators of the Lifers Group had become incarcerated many years before the genre of rap music was created, so they were unsure of Melvins' proposal, but they eventually approved his idea. In his search for the technical and financial resources to facilitate the project Melvins built a working relationship with David Funken-Klein, the first head of Disney Music Group's rap subsidiary Hollywood Basic. From within the prison, Melvins created six EP s, one album, and multiple music videos with the Lifers Group, and became President of the organization. In his verse of their first song, "Belly of the Beast," Melvins conveys his message that prison is not a good place to be: "I used to have a name, but now I got a number. I used to put suckers, six feet under. Now I’m in jail, no longer a rebel. You can’t tell me damn thing about the ghetto. I been there."

Rahway State Prison's Corrections Officer Lieutenant Alan August performed with the Lifers Group in their music videos and served as their logistics coordinator, helping them take care of things outside of the prison that they could not be allowed to do. In 1991 Richard Wormser, who wrote many books about the troubles of poverty, race, and discrimination, published Lifers: Learn the Truth at the Expense of Our Sorrow.

In 1993 Melvins was transferred to a different prison. The corrections department did not inform Melvins or the public why the transfer occurred, other than saying "there's no ulterior motive for moving Maxwell". Salaam Ismial, president of the non-profit National United Youth Council, felt the transfer was inappropriate and planned to write a letter to the corrections department asking them "to make a decision of bringing this young man back to where he was doing good work." For Melvins, the transfer created barriers of communication that impeded him from continuing his music project.

During Incarceration
In 1991 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference awarded Melvins and the Lifers Group their annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award for "helping keep youth out of prison and extraordinary work for the good of humanity."

In 1992 Maxwell Melvins and the Lifers Group were nominated for a Grammy, in the category of Best Long Form Music Video, for their piece Lifers Group World Tour: Rahway Prison, That's It!  The other nominees they competed against were Billy Joel, Peter Gabriel, Madonna, and Sinead O'Connor. The prison administration would not allow Melvins to go to Radio City Music Hall to attend the Grammy Award ceremony. To capture the uniqueness of the Lifers Group's nomination the 20/20 news show came into Rahway Prison on the day of the ceremony and interviewed Melvins while he watched the event on television, and broadcast the scene of him crying as Madonna won.

In 1993 the State of New Jersey Commission of Investigation discussed the positive effect of the Lifers Group.

In 2006 items from the personal archives of Maxwell Melvins was accessioned by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, as part of their “Hip-Hop Won’t Stop: The Beat, The Rhymes, The Life” collecting initiative.

Post-Incarceration
Maxwell Melvins was released from prison in 2012 and has continued his effort to teach people about the risks of a life of drugs, crime, domestic violence, and incarceration.

In 2017 he was interviewed by Dr. Nicole Fleetwood at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and later that year became Senior Advisor to the Die Jim Crow project.

In 2018 he gave a lecture, "Using the Story of My Crime As a Platform for Restorative Justice," at TEDx CUNY.

In 2019 Melvins spoke at the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Hip Hop Education Conference.

In his hometown of Camden, New Jersey, Melvins serves as a Reentry Peer Specialist as part of the Camden County Department of Corrections Reentry Community Engagement Committee.