It’s part dancehall, part Afrobeats, with an ominous jazz riff and powerful lyrics that decry the way poverty and inequality produce criminals from citizens: “Born a Criminal,” by a Trinidadian collective of formerly incarcerated artists called Critical Mas—in collaboration with renowned jazz musician Etienne Charles—is poised to take airwaves by storm.
The song is set to be released on September 20, with an NYC listening session event on September 12 at Doux Nightclub and one in Port of Spain, Trinidad, at The Burg on September 21, the song—produced by Rheon Elbourne, credited as the inventor of “Trinibad” music, akin to Jamaican dancehall—was originally written by group member Friday as a calypso tune back in 2010 when he was incarcerated in Trinidad’s youth detention center. Friday won the People’s Choice Award with “Born a Criminal”—but never thought it would transform years later to become part of something much bigger than music.
Critical Mas represents the first time a group of people impacted by the devastatingly inefficient justice system in Trinidad and Tobago have been given an artistic platform with which to make a change. Such change is desperately needed in a country ranked in 2023 as having the sixth-highest homicide rate in the world, with gun violence, drug trafficking, and its ripple effects drivers of this abysmal situation. At the same time, the country’s prison population keeps expanding—with no ameliorative effect on crime rates—and the average wait for trial hovers at six years, leaving thousands of legally innocent people behind bars for more than a decade while the wheels of justice churn slowly, if at all.
One of these people was Critical Mas member Nicholas Khan, who waited 11 years for trial and eventually pled guilty out of desperation. Khan, who entered prison in Trinidad at 17 years old with no literacy skills, learned to read in prison; inspired by the work of Tupac Shakur, he found passion for poetry and published two books from behind bars. Khan’s spoken-word brilliance is on display in several upcoming releases by Critical Mas, including “Death Around the Corner.”
Another member of Critical Mas is the multitalented Romel Lezama, also known as Papa Mel. While incarcerated for a decade at Trinidad’s Youth Training and Rehabilitation Centre (YTRC), he was a nine-time prisons calypso monarch who made history by becoming the first incarcerated person to qualify for a National Calypso Monarch semi-final. Freed less than a year ago, Lezama is also a boxer for the TT Amateur Boxing Association and a drummer in the Prime Minister’s Best Village competition. His single “Prison to Palace” will be Critical Mas’s next release.
Critical Mas is housed under the umbrella of Incarceration Nations Network, a global prison reform organization helmed by well-known writer, professor and activist Dr. Baz Dreisinger. It all began when Dr. Baz and Etienne Charles began scheming up justice collaborations in Trinidad on the heels of the publication of her best-selling book Incarceration Nations and the debut of his landmark 2022 production San Juan Hill: A New York Story, which marked the reopening of David Geffen Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center. Performed by Etienne Charles & Creole Soul and the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Music Director Jaap van Zweden.
San Juan Hill is an immersive multimedia work that transports the audience via music, visuals, and original first-person accounts of the history of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and the Indigenous and immigrant communities that populated the land on which Lincoln Center resides.
Dr. Baz and Etienne began conceiving of a similar musical production about the crisis of prisons in Trinidad and Tobago, using an immersive artistic approach and anchored—like the lauded San Juan Hill—in the theme of exile and invisibility, which defines both incarcerated people and socially disappeared people, globally.
Research for this future production began in January 2024 in the form of a month-long therapeutic arts workshop for a group of currently and formerly incarcerated artists in Trinidad, led by Etienne and Dr. Baz. With each workshop the group kept growing and the incredible talent emerging in full force. The collective of currently and formerly incarcerated artists and survivors of crime in Trinidad began taking on a life of its own, developing a name and an identity: Critical Mas. The name connotes two things: the fact that for the first time in the country’s history, a critical mass of people with lived experience of the justice system have a prominent platform with which to effect change; and the Carnival theme of the collective’s work–the ultimate cultural flagship of Trinidad–makes this mas (masquerade) especially critical to society.
The debut of Critical Mas happened at Etienne’s grand Road March show at Queen’s Hall Performing Arts Center in February, 2024; the troupe performed to another packed house at a Port of Spain venue in April, 2024.
An upcoming Carnival season tour will bring Critical Mas to schools, concerts and community spaces like pan yards, where the group will both perform and engage in dialogue about justice and prisons. When engaging with schools during the tours, Critical Mas will use art and multimedia platforms to promote the discussion with youth, who are the most impacted by community harm, lack of safety and the crisis of prisons in TnT.
As a project, Critical Mas taps into two vital methods used in the United States to move the needle toward more thoughtful justice approaches: the use of art in pushing for culture change and the empowerment of people with lived experience of the justice system, not just as spokespeople but as lead actors in justice reform. This is a strategy that has already proved successful in the US context, where major artistic works about the criminal justice system radically shifted public opinion about mass incarceration, moving it from the margins to the mainstream and thereby also making it a more funding-friendly issue; this, in turn, led to policy change, the growth of organizations doing thoughtful justice work and implementation of more progressive justice practices throughout the US.