“LISTEN to these songs, not because it’s such a worthwhile project, though it is, but because you’ll love them”, Ricky Ross advised BBC Radio Scotland listeners of Not Known At This Address, the most striking Scottish album of the year so far.

Featuring C Duncan, Kris Drever, Emma Pollock, Rachel Sermanni, Admiral Fallow, Bdy_Prts, Pronto Mama, Fiskur and Donna Maciocia, the album’s 10 songs are cowritten by people with first-hand experience of Scotland’s criminal justice system as part of a project called Distant Voices.

Many of the musicians will help launch Not Known At This Address at special gigs at Glasgow’s Saint Luke’s (May 25) and Leith Theatre (May 29) as part of the Hidden Door Festival.

Louis Abbott, frontman of Admiral Fallow, is creative lead on Distant Voices, now a partnership between the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh, the University of the West of Scotland and Vox Liminis, an arts organisation focusing on criminal justice issues.

“Vox Liminis first called me in to play a session at Castle Huntly near Dundee,” Abbott says. “I did a few more in prisons around Scotland and when they got some funding, they offered me a position as creative lead for the whole project over a variety of sessions.”

Abbott and another songwriter would introduce the project to a particular prison and return a few weeks later, with the offer to collaborate open to anyone interested in taking part. Some musicians were able to attend a few sessions, such as Emma Pollock, co-writer of stunning album centrepiece I Won’t Follow Him To The Grave. Others were just available for the day.

“It was often a case of: ‘We’ve only got you for this one session, so we hope something good comes of it,’” says Abbott. “That speaks to the bizarre mix of styles, like the C Duncan one – the song doesn’t sound anything like C Duncan usually does and that highlights how collaborative the whole process was.

“These collaborations are what makes it a really interesting album musically.”

Seven of the songs were co-written by prisoners, while album closer Dining Room Hospital is a collaboration between Abbott himself and criminologist Sarah Anderson. Elsewhere, Ross Clark aka Fiskur worked with a social worker and BDY_PRTS collaborated with a prison officer.

Prison staff were required to be present during sessions, Abbott says, and rather than have them “sitting in the corner with their arms crossed”, they were encouraged to be involved.

Distant Voices began as a project working exclusively with prisoners, says Alison Urie, who founded Vox Liminis in 2013 with criminology professor Fergus McNeill, and developed the organisation in partnership with the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the University of Glasgow.

“Then we discovered the beauty that can happen when you get a group of people involved,” Urie says. “So we’d get together, say, a couple of prisoners, a couple of prison officers and a couple of people from the community getting together with a band. To see a group of people making stuff together is very special. It’s when people start to see their similarities with each other, when they start to see their common humanity.”

Urie adds: “Prisoners and prison officers began to talk about how they see each other as more alike than different. They saw aspects of their common humanity through making the work together. That’s how you change things, when people see each other as human beings rather than being the role that they play or the thing that they’ve done, and that’s what we hope audiences might take from these songs too.”

Not Known At This Address marks the end of the first year of what has become a three-year research project between the three universities exploring people’s experiences of returning home after being in prison as well as the positive possibilities offered by the songwriting process.

“We realised that, as well as being a good communication tool, songwriting is something that brings people together and, in itself, is an integration process,” says Urie.

Vox Luminis also engages with affected families and young people through KIN, a project using a variety of creative forms such as film, spoken word and theatre.

“We also work with institutions that people are part of when they’re subject to a sentence, with communities, and on general public attitudes towards crime and punishment,” says Urie. “If we as a society punish people and exclude them, then we have to also allow them to move on from that when their time is done.

“We believe that the reintegration of criminals after punishment is something that everyone needs to play a part in, and helps make a safer society for everyone.”

Friday, Saint Luke’s, Glasgow, 7.30pm, £11.37. Tickets: bit.ly/DistantLukes

May 29, Hidden Door Festival, Leith Theatre, Edinburgh, 7pm, £12, £10 concs. Tickets: bit.ly/DistantHidden www.distantvoices.org.uk