Inside Cameroon’s toughest prison, inmates record songs and videos

Inside New Bell Central Prison in Douala, inmates have been recording songs and music videos through Jail Time Records, a nonprofit label that grew out of the Central Prison of Douala and is now being held up as a rare creative outlet inside one of Cameroon’s toughest prisons. The project’s founders, Dione Roach and Steve Happi, also known as Vidou H., have pushed it beyond a local curiosity into a broader experiment in rehabilitation, even as the prison’s conditions remain stark.

New Bell was built for 800 inmates, but recent accounts put the population at more than 4,000 detainees. That crowding is not just a backdrop to the music. Human Rights Watch warned in April 2022 that overcrowding, poor hygiene and a lack of potable water in Cameroon’s prisons raised the risk of a cholera outbreak. Older reporting put the prison’s construction in 1935 and said it was already holding more than 3,500 people by 2008, underscoring how far the jail has long exceeded its intended scale.

Against that setting, Jail Time Records has helped incarcerated people write, record and release their own music, with one account saying the label has worked with hundreds of prisoners and former prisoners. Its output includes songs and videos shot inside the prison walls, among them “Hands Up High” by Big Dre featuring CMK Vibes. Artists linked to the project have also included Stone, Lele Badman and JEJE, giving the label a roster that extends well beyond a single breakout act.

The idea has drawn attention well outside Cameroon. The Guardian featured the label in May 2022 as a source of hope in a Cameroonian jail. Dione Roach later described the project in an October 2024 interview, and a Bosla Arts podcast episode in May 2025 discussed how the label began inside the prison and later expanded to a studio outside the jail in Douala and a new recording facility inside Ouagadougou’s prison in Burkina Faso.

That expansion has turned Jail Time Records into more than a prison pastime. A 94-minute documentary, also titled Jail Time Records, screened at Tribeca in 2026 and focused on three incarcerated artists using music to speak from inside the system. The label has also reached Cameroon’s pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, where a three-channel audiovisual installation built from Dione Roach’s video work and Steve Happi’s music was open at the Gervasuti Foundation in Venice until 22 November 2026. The harder question is whether the art changes life after the cameras leave, or whether it mainly exposes how extreme the prison conditions remain.