This data set comprises transcripts of audio-recorded semi-structured interviews with participants in 2-day or 3-day collaborative songwriting workshops (which we refer to as 'Vox Sessions') which were loosely themed around reintegration after state punishment. The workshops were undertaken in a variety of settings, in prisons and communities, with criminal justice-involved people.Distant Voices responded to pressing public policy and political challenges created by huge rises in the numbers of people subject to penal sanctions and by high levels of reoffending. Turning conventional understandings of 'offender rehabilitation' on their head, the project was concerned not with 'correcting offenders' but rather with exploring and changing how they are received when 'coming home' after punishment. The project aimed: (1) to improve academic and public understandings of social re/integration after punishment; (2) to develop innovative practices to better support re/integration; and (3) to better engage a range of citizens, communities and civil society institutions in re/integration. As a collaborative action research project drawing on criminology, popular music, politics and other disciplines, Distant Voices combined creative practices (principally songwriting and sharing), research and knowledge exchange to enable dialogue and learning about re/integration -- and to practice and support it. Its participatory methods drew together a wide range of differently situated citizens, organisations and associations to form a 'community of enquiry' and of creative practice. This range of participants worked across three inter-related activities. (1) In 'Co-creative inquiry' justice-affected people worked with one another, with researchers and with musicians to write songs that explored, represented and reflected on re/integration. (2) In 'Co-creative dialogue', some of the songs were shared and discussed through the production and release of an album and 2 EPs, a large range of public performances, a podcast series (The Art of Bridging), and other web-based materials. (3) In 'Co-creative discovery', a core group of the wider community of enquiry worked together to explore their learning and to assess what had been achieved in and through the project. Through these activities, Distant Voices aspired to develop theories and concepts of reintegration and rehabilitation, to influence related behaviours, to inform interventions and, more broadly, to encourage the development of a fairer and more vibrant society.

Brief semi-structured interviews were undertaken with all participants on the final day of 2-3 day songwriting workshops (known as Vox Sessions). These interviews typically lasted 15-30 minutes and allowed participants to reflect and feed back upon their experiences and on what they have learned in the process. The participants included people serving prison sentences of various lengths, people living in the community after release from prison (including some subject to post-release supervision licenses), people working in prisons and criminal justice social workers, other people working in the justice system or related fields of practice, family of people in or after prison, and people who had been direct or indirect victims of crime. We worked with four prisons (an open prison, a young offenders institution holding young men and young women [which also held some adult women], a large local prison in a major city, and a smaller local prison serving a more rural area), and in two community settings (the large city in which the large local prison was based, and the town in which the local rural prison was based). We recruited participants both through the prisons and partner organisations and, on some occasions, by performing gigs in the prisons ahead of the workshops. All participants took part on a voluntary basis.