by Aaliyah Amos
Tiyana Scarlett carried the weight of her incarceration in silence for years. Released in 2017, she buried her guilt until 2024, when she joined Ritual4Return, a New Jersey program that uses art to help formerly incarcerated people heal.
“It wasn’t until I started the classes at Ritual4Return, that I realized my story actually needed to be heard,” she recalls.
The brainchild of Kevin Bott, a Rutgers University alumnus and NYU-trained theater educator, Ritual4Return’s 14-week program, which alternates between men’s and women’s cohorts, uses drumming, storytelling, and ritual to help participants reclaim their lives — and stories — after incarceration.
Rooted in Creativity and Community
Anyone — community members, participants’ families, friends, as well as Rutgers-Newark students and faculty, can attend a Ritual4Return performance. But there’s one requirement. Attendees don’t just watch. They participate.
Performing creates an “experience for the participants and the community,” Bott explains.
You’re bearing witness
Kevin Bott
Rooted in community, restoring the social contract, and the idea of transformative justice, the ritual ceremony requires the community to be on their toes — ready to respond and support the participants. Attendees arrive early for a pre-show workshop, “and we do some exercises that help them connect” through storytelling and learning their roles in the ritual, Bott says.
Audience members learn the parts they are meant to play in the ritual, which means learning a call-and-response sequence or the songs the participants sing during the performance.
“Rather than watch or spectate,” Bott says, “you’re bearing witness.”
Healing the 95%
Bott launched Ritual4Return in 2009. In 2006, while a doctoral student in educational theater at New York University, he began working with Rehabilitation Through The Arts to teach theater in prisons in New York. The organization recently inspired the movie “Sing Sing,” which highlights the importance of rehabilitation programs in carceral institutions.
The need for healing-based reentry programs is certainly there. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “at least 95%” of all people incarcerated by the State “will be released from prison at some point.”
Bott says, “The problem is on the other side, when 95% of people are going to come home, there is nothing to re-elevate them.” That’s where programs for post-incarceration healing and support, like Ritual4Return, can help.
It’s More Than Dancing
Ritual4Return expanded to Newark in 2023 through partnerships with the Returning Citizens Support Group and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
The program also collaborates with the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prison Consortium, a Rutgers-Newark-based consortium offering college courses to incarcerated students.
“You don’t just show up and dance, you have to put a good amount of thinking and use theoretical frameworks,” Christopher Agans, the executive director of NJSTEP, explains.
Instead, Ritual4Return “brings together a lot of the content that we teach,” Agans says. “It’s rooted in classical understandings of what ritual, tradition, and performance means.”
Agans says integrating the humanities across disciplines is key to the success of communities. “The core of the humanities is to think about the world around you and your place in it,” Agans says. “It’s an important anchor to the purpose of your life.”
The Returning Citizens Support Group and NJSTEP also assist with recruitment for Ritual4Return. Bott explains that recruitment can sometimes be difficult because it is a new framework, and people are also trying to reorient their lives.
“Life intervenes,” Bott says. “Whether it’s a job hustle, an apartment hustle, reconnecting with family, taking care of elder parents, there’s just a million things that come up.”
Never put a period where a comma is supposed to be.Tiyana Scarlett
To encourage participation, participants who are community members are given a financial stipend or three college credits through NJSTEP for students.
The initiative recently secured a $15,000 matching grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities to support the next cohorts. A new women’s cohort starts on May 4, and is open to all women who have been incarcerated, regardless of how long they have been on the outside. Botts also says the process of expanding Ritual4Return nationally will start this summer through a training camp taking place in July at Rutgers-Newark.
As for Scarlett, now, she can’t stop telling her story — through performances, podcasts, and even at her church. “Healing is a journey (so) never put a period where a comma is supposed to be,” she says.
