Deep inside the overcrowded, crumbling concrete barriers of New Bell Prison in Douala, Cameroon, a self-sustaining parallel world thrives. Inmates operate informal delivery services nicknamed “prison taxis,” self-appointed inmate enforcers assist overstretched security staff, and open-air markets sell homemade fried cassava and beignets to the facility’s population. Now, a gritty, transformative initiative born from this adaptive culture is turning incarcerated artists into global creative voices: Jail Time Records, an in-prison independent music label and documentary project that just earned international acclaim.
Against the harsh backdrop of one of Africa’s most notoriously violent and overcapacity prisons, Jail Time Records offers more than just a recording space. It is a space of catharsis, rehabilitation, and freedom beyond the four concrete walls that hold its artists. The project was born by chance in 2018, when Italian artist Dione Roach volunteered with a non-profit running arts programming inside New Bell. During a casual dance workshop for inmates, a group of aspiring rappers grabbed the microphone to deliver raw, unplanned freestyles. Blown away by their talent and vulnerability, Roach approached prison officials for permission to build a small on-site studio. When authorities approved the request, she partnered with Steve Happi, a former New Bell inmate with first-hand experience of the prison’s injustices, to lead the project as producer and sound engineer.
Happi’s own path to New Bell underscores the arbitrary nature of justice that many incarcerated people face. After a bitter family dispute over his late father’s remains, his aunt—a high-ranking Cameroonian judge—allegedly arranged to have him imprisoned on false charges of patricide. He was ultimately acquitted two years later, and carried a deep understanding of how the carceral system strips people of agency and voice. For Happi, the studio became a tool to push back against that erasure: “It’s this instrument of resistance… where we can really share friendship, love and our voices can be heard,” he told the BBC’s *Talking Movies* program. “We don’t think anymore about the four walls – we find the freedom.”
That freedom has resonated far beyond New Bell’s gates. Today, tracks recorded in the studio’s spartan 100-square-foot booth—where a single desktop computer powers all recording work—have earned fans across South Africa, the United States, and Argentina. One of the label’s biggest stars, Empereur, a longtime gang leader serving a 10-year sentence for multiple violent offenses, has accumulated 24,000 YouTube views for a music video filmed entirely on-location inside the prison. The initiative has grown to include artists from the prison’s women’s wing, where Jeje, the label’s first female signee, debuted her brooding 2022 Afrobeats track *Show Me The Way*, exploring her experience of incarceration after fleeing an abusive uncle. In 2022, the collective released *Jail Time Vol 1*, their first full album, with half of all profits going directly to the incarcerated artists and the rest reinvested into expanding the label.
The story of the project has now been captured in an eponymous feature documentary, co-directed by Happi and Roach over six years of on-site filming. Last month, the film took home three top awards, including Best Documentary Feature, at New York’s prestigious Tribeca Film Festival, with Oscar-winning New Zealand director Taika Waititi and his wife, pop star Rita Ora, signing on as executive producers. Waititi praised the project for the profound role it plays for incarcerated people, many of whom are serving life sentences: “Just in terms of the power of art in relation to redemption and what that can mean to someone who, you know, some of these people are in prison for life. I think having an outlet is an incredibly powerful and humane thing.”
The documentary pulls no punches about the grim realities of life inside New Bell. A 2022 Human Rights Watch report found the facility, originally built to hold just 1,175 people, crammed with 4,700 inmates—four times its intended capacity. Unsaniatry, overcrowded conditions fueled a deadly cholera outbreak in 2020 that killed at least six prisoners, and the prison has a long history of violence: in 2008, guards shot and killed 16 inmates during an attempted uprising. The film itself shows Empereur shaking down a young, newly arrived inmate for his necklace and flip-flops, a raw depiction of the coercive power dynamics that shape daily life inside.
Critics have questioned whether the project risks glorifying incarcerated people who have committed violent offenses, but Roach pushes back on that framing, emphasizing that the initiative is rooted in harm reduction and rehabilitation, not glorification. “The process we’re doing is a rehabilitation process, basically. We enter the prison without any judgment and it’s the only way we can really approach this kind of work,” she explained. “Music, as with any creative process, is also a way of self-discovery… coming to terms with things you’ve done and hopefully changing for the better.”
Prison officials have embraced that approach, with the prison’s warden even attending the label’s 2024 courtyard concert and dancing alongside performing inmates. With official support and growing international attention, the project is expanding: in 2023, Roach and Happi opened a second Jail Time Records studio inside a maximum-security prison in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, 1,600 kilometers from the original New Bell location, with plans to replicate the label, video production, and documentary model there.
For the artists who record at New Bell, the impact goes far beyond streaming numbers or festival awards. The documentary profiles Stone, a former presidential guard serving 10 years for armed robbery (a crime he maintains he did not commit), who raps in his track *Heart of Stone*: “I’m closed and tight like a cell door. No solid ground I slip like a fish.” The film captures his repeated, often unsuccessful attempts to call his young daughter Maira, moments that lay bare the deep pain of separation that incarceration brings. Even for those who will never leave New Bell alive, the film closes with a quiet tribute to six inmates who died during the project’s six years of filming, the project offers something no prison can take away: a sense of purpose.
As Happi puts it, music acts as a “lantern for a brighter future” for men and women who have been written off by society. “Before that, they had the stubborn mentality: it’s them against the world,” he says. “They feel now important – they feel like they have a place in the society.”