The purpose of this panel, Music-Making in Prisons: Sustainability, Programming, and Working within Systems We Reject, is to interrogate the paradox of sustaining music initiatives within carceral structures that we ultimately oppose. While music in prisons has been shown to foster connection, healing, and resistance for incarcerated people, the very act of working within prisons raises profound ethical and political questions. Programs are vulnerable to institutional instability, leadership turnover, and shifting priorities, but beyond these pragmatic challenges lies a deeper contradiction: how do we build and maintain continuity in spaces designed for dispossession, surveillance, and control? How might music education programs in prison contexts dismantle the very harmful spaces of prisons and work to build and create alternatives that make current oppressive systems obsolete (Bell, 2021, p. 46)?Educational and music-making opportunities in prison are often viewed by prison officials and society as dispensable services—unnecessary and easily eliminated. As a result, music-making programs remain vulnerable to shifts in leadership both within and beyond carceral settings. Facilitators of prison music programs also serve as the “face” of these initiatives, raising critical questions: What happens when prisons decide to terminate such programs? What happens when facilitators leave their supporting institutions? How do programs continue in the absence of their founders? How do facilitators sustain their abolitionist commitments without working directly inside prisons? And what strategies can facilitators use to design succession plans that ensure the longevity of music-making in carceral spaces?Drawing on abolitionist frameworks, this panel resists the narrative of prison music programs as neutral or benevolent interventions. Instead, we examine how such initiatives might simultaneously sustain liberatory practices while refusing to legitimize the carceral state. Panelists will explore how sustainability can be reconceptualized as building infrastructures of resistance—developing leadership among system-impacted communities, creating pathways that extend beyond prison walls, bridging relationships between the “inside” and “outside,” and ensuring that music-making contributes to collective freedom dreams rather than institutional reform alone.By weaving together research, case studies, and practitioner testimony, this session situates music-making in prisons as a contested but urgent practice: one that holds potential for radical imagination and even while operating in spaces of profound harm. In doing so, the panel seeks to provoke dialogue about how music educators, artists, and researchers might engage in abolitionist praxis—sustaining programming while simultaneously dismantling the very systems that render such programming necessary.