Inside Wayne Kramer’s Fight for Criminal Justice Reform 

This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is co-published in partnership with Rolling Stone.

In many ways, rock musician Wayne Kramer was a true radical. The former guitarist for the protopunk band the MC5 — who died Feb. 2 of cancer at age 75 — was known for the revolutionary fire in his music, but also for the activism for prison reform that defined his later years.

That cause was informed by his own life-changing experience as a federal drug offender imprisoned in the mid-1970s. It led to his creation of Jail Guitar Doors USA, an initiative to promote rehabilitation in prisons through the donation of musical instruments and on-site instruction, while lobbying for change in what Kramer called an increasingly inhumane and unfair prison system.

“What we do is damage people. We damage them for decades,” Kramer told me in a 2015 interview, biting on his words. “Where we are as a country is an international embarrassment.”

The central mission of Jail Guitar Doors, he said, was to reach inmates through music on a “human level, on the street level of actually putting guitars in prisoners’ hands and encouraging them to figure out a way to process their problems that is positive and nonconfrontational.”

He could still easily recite his prison serial number from his two-and-a-half-year stint in federal prison: 00180-190. As he spoke that day, sitting in his studio office on Fairfax in Los Angeles, a row of guitars waited to be shipped out to a prison in Chino the following week.

In both music and content, his band the MC5 (aka the Motor City 5) were at the forefront of 1960s rock acts confronting the U.S. political establishment, with a group manifesto that promised “rock ’n’ roll, dope, and fucking in the streets!” The Detroit quintet were blue collar at their core and aligned with the radical White Panther Party, a hometown anti-racist collective, and took their message to the doorstep of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago for a protest concert, as police helicopters hovered. None of the other scheduled bands showed up.

That uncompromising sound and image were a profound influence on generations of politically outspoken rock artists, from the first wave of punk rock in the ’70s to Rage Against the Machine in the ’90s and beyond. After Kramer’s death was announced, his friend Tom Morello, guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, posted on Instagram: “Brother Wayne Kramer was the best man I’ve ever known.”

He was talking not just of Kramer’s musical influence, but of his life as a political activist and proselytizer for prison reform. Morello praised the guitarist for joining him at protests and picket lines, including a 2011 demonstration in the snow outside the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, against an anti-union measure called the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, signed by then-Gov. Scott Walker. In turn, Morello was a frequent participant in Kramer’s Jail Guitar Doors actions and performed concerts with the elder guitarist for inmates. 

“He possessed a one-of-a-kind mixture of deep wisdom & profound compassion, beautiful empathy and tenacious conviction,” Morello wrote, noting Kramer’s open-ended work “helping folks get sober. Helping ex-cons find a job. Helping at risk youth start careers in music. Wayne was a guardian angel to so many.”

After the MC5 broke apart in 1972, Kramer fell deep into a heroin habit, which led to dealing drugs and becoming a petty criminal. He was convicted of drug trafficking at 26 and in 1975 sent to a medium-security facility in Lexington, Kentucky. Years later at his studio, Kramer would jokingly call the lockup “my old Kentucky home.”

Inside the penitentiary, Kramer became part of a population of federal offenders drawn mostly from big urban centers east of the Mississippi, and who were there largely for crimes of drugs and alcohol: “I was terrified. I grew up in Detroit, I knew how to fight, but this is another thing. It wasn’t about boxing. It was about stabbing. I’m not a killer. That’s why I was a complete failure as a drug dealer. As a gangster, I’m a great guitar player.”

“I’m a classic archetype drug war prisoner — nonviolent, economic drug crime,” he told me in that extensive interview in 2015, one of several occasions over the years we talked about the mission of JGD and his work as a musician. “As I’ve watched other people just like me go to prison first by the thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and today millions — I’ve seen this prison industrial complex grow.”

Every aspect of his daily life there was dictated by the guards: the food, the daily routine, plus the ongoing hostility between inmates and the staff. “It’s an atmosphere that brings out the absolute worst in people,” he said. “It’s Hobbesian. It’s Lord of the Flies. Then we expect them to come back out, live next door to us, stand in line at the supermarket, sit in a movie theater and be good members in civic life.” 

Kramer went on, “A lot of politicians got a lot of votes by being perceived as tough on crime. What they have in fact succeeded at is making us less safe.”

During his time at Lexington, there were a couple of murders and occasional stabbings. The inmate in the cell next to his killed another nearby prisoner one night. “I heard the police in the hallway. There was blood. It was horrific.”

Fortunately, the mid-’70s was also an era that encouraged some meaningful efforts to rehabilitate convicts. At Lexington, progressive programming included group therapy and classes taught by visiting teachers from the University of Kentucky. Kramer learned that parole boards like prisoners to earn certificates, and he signed up for every class he could.

Just as important, Kramer was allowed to have a guitar in his cell, a Gibson Les Paul electric. (He said a guard stole his amplifier.) After lunch, he would sit in his cell practicing every day, learning modes and scales, while other prisoners were out in the yard.

“When I was playing music, I wasn’t in prison anymore,” he said. “I was back at rehearsal. I was back in the band.”

In 2009, with his wife, Margaret Saadi Kramer, he established Jail Guitar Doors USA, picking up on an initiative started in the United Kingdom by folk-punk troubadour Billy Bragg. The program has volunteers coach inmates on how to play and write songs about their lives.

The British version was initially named after a raucous 1977 song by the Clash called “Jail Guitar Doors.” Kramer already knew the song — since it was written partly about him, with its clanging guitars and opening lyric: “Let me tell you ’bout Wayne and his deals of cocaine/A little more every day … Then the D.E.A. locked him away.”

As a public advocate for prison reform, Kramer found inspiration in the example of Johnny Cash, who in the late 1960s famously performed at the California prisons San Quentin and Folsom, and recorded popular albums there, among other penitentiary visits around the country. The country singer also testified before Congress in 1972 for prison reform and met with President Richard M. Nixon.

“He had great empathy for people that slip through the cracks, as I think a lot of musicians do,” Kramer said of Cash. “We traditionally identify with people that are marginalized.”

Likewise, Kramer traveled to Washington a half-dozen times to lobby Congress and White House staff. Eventually, Cash grew discouraged by setbacks in his efforts to help prisoners, and stepped away from the cause, but Kramer never wavered, even when facing complex bureaucracy and resistance from authorities.

Just a year ago, he opened the C.A.P.O. (Community Arts Programming & Outreach) Center in Los Angeles as a place for expanded Jail Guitar Doors education, technology training and employment guidance for at-risk youth and ex-convicts. Backstage last year at a benefit concert in Glendale, California, for autism research, Kramer told me the new facility was designed to reach young people early enough in their lives to help prevent a pathway to crime and incarceration.

“We’ve been in the prisons for 15 years now,” he said. “I realized if I can get an instrument in a kid’s hand, and I can get them interested in something besides banging, then I don’t have to give him a guitar later at San Quentin.”

Kramer understood the impulse of civilians to dismiss the brutality inside prison walls as well deserved by criminals, which the guitarist regarded as basic ignorance of the real horrors there. 

“You don’t know what it is to be unsafe 24-7 all the time — to be forced to be around people, some of whom are very dangerous, who are very sick, who can only relate to other people sadistically,” Kramer explained. “You don’t know what the next day or the next hour might hold. To have to endure that for months and years and decades for nonviolent people who have no business being there in the first place — half the people in prison are nonviolent drug offenders. They shouldn’t even be there. Prison should be the last resort for someone’s accountability.”

In 2014, I accompanied Kramer and Jail Guitar Doors on a visit to the Twin Towers wing of L.A. County Jail. Upstairs at the downtown facility, Kramer and other volunteers met with a group of men sitting with guitars around a table painted with a checkerboard surface.

“It’s hard to get in here, huh?” a prisoner named Jon joked to the visitors. “Guess what, it’s a lot harder to get out!” He laughed hoarsely, but then began singing, holding an acoustic guitar with a Jail Guitar Doors logo. He wore two sets of glasses — one for reading, the other for his glaucoma — as he, Kramer and another prisoner strummed overlapping melodies on their instruments.

Beneath the bright fluorescent light, Jon sang: “Often daydream how it used to be/ Laughing kids and you and me/Miss your touch and miss your style … Now it’s only me, only me…”

One prisoner played an antiwar song, another sang a jazzy romantic tune. A few others harmonized together on Tom Petty’s “Breakdown.” In a crew cut and handlebar mustache, Jon, 52, observed the inmates around the table and said, “These people right here should not be loaded up with people who are predatory. Everyone in this program is interested in bettering our lives.”

After the session with Jail Guitar Doors ended, the men were lined up and marched out of the classroom area, and the instruments were stacked inside a closet. The policy at the jail was that instruments were available only during JGD sessions. Prisoners who were singing minutes earlier were now headed back to their cells.

As Kramer walked out of the jail to his muscle car in the parking lot, he spoke of the ongoing hurdles in reaching inmates with his program. There was frustration but no apparent anger in his voice. With years of experience dealing with jails and prisons of all kinds, he was realistic about the political climate that values retribution over rehabilitation. And he remained committed until the end.

“This is a long slow process,” he said, adding with a weary grin, “We may not see justice reform and prison reform in my lifetime. I think I’m a little gear in a big machine, but I’m not alone.”

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