Thoughtful - Some Things Are Not All That Funny

"So what's on your minds, guys?" It was a really open-ended question to ask a group of incarcerated teenage boys, and the range of answers I got pretty much lived up to my expectations;

"Eatin' Pizza;" "Girls;" "Eatin' Pizza with girls!" There were a few other topics that I am probably better off leaving to your imagination.

Josh White, Jr. and I were working our way through the first session of a new idea we were developing, helping severely troubled young people explore some of their deepest feelings by writing and performing folk and blues songs. At the time we were calling the program "Project Roots," referring to the fact that traditional folk and blues, or "roots music," forms the foundation on which all other American music is built.

Who'd have thought good crops
Could come from a bad seed?

It was a pretty good line in a really good poem, entitled "Look At Me," by a seventeen year old African-American poet named Donald. This young man was theoretically every bit as dangerous as he was gifted; he was incarcerated in the WJ Maxey Boys Training School as a violent offender.

I was working with Donald on a documentary called "Young Poet Incarcerated," helping him polish some of his work and rehearse it before we rolled the camera. We had been given some money by the National Endowment for the Arts through the Michigan Humanities Council and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs to cover some of the costs of making our movie.

His name was Ryan, and he was not the most popular guy in the group. He was a big country boy with big farmer arms and a big farmer face, the kind of kid some people might call a "bumpkin." On this particular day he was outnumbered nine to one by street smart city kids.

We were sitting in a circle on a dimly lit stage in the maximum-security WJ Maxey Boys Training School for incarcerated young men, working on a collaborative song about a guy who is, coincidentally, being released after serving time in a maximum-security facility.

She wore a baggy purple shirt over baggy purple sweat pants. Her hair was chopped short and her body was padded with a layer of soft flesh that bore tribute to the starchy diet of incarceration. She had her arms folded across her lap, her gaze fixed on the floor in front of her, and she was almost imperceptibly rocking to a rhythm that only she could hear.

She was maybe sixteen years old.

I can't use her real name here. Let's call her Krissy. I have no idea how she came to be locked up. It is not a question we ever ask. We can safely assume that at some point in her short life everything just spun out of control, to the point that it no longer worked for her to be out in the world.