Shirelle gave Battles the sheet back with A through C completed. But Battles handed it back to her, asking for goals D through F, and the next day, G through I.

Battles believed in Shirelle. She wanted her to do something with her life. This pushed Shirelle, who had experienced incarceration or supervision since she was 12, to think about changing. She knew it was time.

“I felt like a cancer,” Shirelle said. “I felt like I was just destructive to other people that I loved. I couldn’t live with that. So, I just decided I wasn’t gonna do it no more.”

Shirelle’s transformation led the Philadelphia native rapper to join and help lead FREER Records, a nonprofit record label publishing the music of incarcerated musicians from 17 prisons in 10 states, following her release. Shirelle helped build the first record label in the country for prison-impacted musicians — amplifying their stories to a growing audience of more than 100,000 streams on multiple music platforms.

Shirelle’s first arrest as an adult happened shortly after her 18th birthday in 2005. She was sentenced to six years for aggravated assault after getting into a shootout with an undercover cop in Germantown. She was released for 18 months, then arrested again for selling drugs.

Shirelle honed her musical gifts in prison. Other incarcerated people approached Shirelle if they wanted words written for a relative’s funeral, Shirelle said. She would write poems for them and even sing songs with them in the yard.

“I would ask them what their families were like and I’d make a nice poem for the family to read at the funeral,” Shirelle said. “Or I would walk the yard with my guitar, if anyone liked to sing, I would play the guitar while they sang.”

Read the full article about incarceration at The 19th News.