Angela Crafton knows something of the healing power of art.
Almost 10 years ago, Crafton's life of periodic homelessness and drug-driven petty crime ended with a year's sentence in the Philadelphia prison system.
It was only then, when a chance prison class project to design a model jail reignited a childhood interest in art, that Crafton began to believe her future might not include a prison cell.
"The instructor asked us, 'Well, what would it look like?' " Crafton recalled. "I knew what it would look like. I started drawing the floor plans and then, after all that time, it came to me: I'm going back to school for art."
Today, Crafton, 36, who has an honors degree in art education, will be among those speaking to 250 artists, prison officials and criminologists gathered at the Sheraton Center City hotel for what is called a first-ever Arts in Criminal Justice National Conference.
"I know firsthand that art does heal. It healed me," said Crafton, who for three years has worked with the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program teaching art in city prisons to women and teens convicted as adults.
The conference, which runs through Friday, is sponsored by the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and its founder and director, Jane Golden.
The 23-year-old program is best known for the more than 2,700 murals around the city, many by former graffitists and at-risk youths whose talents were channeled to community improvement and beautification.
Since 2001, the program has also worked with inmates from Philadelphia at the state maximum-security prison in Graterford, Montgomery County, and in the city prison complex in the Northeast.
Philadelphia Corrections Commissioner Leon A. King II, a conference speaker, said the program was "about protecting the public, public safety."
At bottom, King said, the inmates are engaged in a creative activity that beautifies their surroundings, teaches a skill and opens them to the possibilities of life after prison.
Some inmates will, like Crafton, go on to college and careers in art. But that is not the program's goal, or the reason 250 people are coming to Philadelphia to hear about it.
Instead, it is about what Golden calls the power of art in "restorative justice."
Golden said the program - about 30 inmates at Graterford and about 500 inmates in Philadelphia - gives participants an out for their emotions, the chance for different future and a way to give back to a community they once victimized.
