Headed to Juvy!

On the bus ride over, I was trying to crack jokes to my friends back on campus telling them “heading to Juvy! Hope they let me out when I’m done” but on the inside my stomach was in knots. Even though I had been told by the Sunday group that it wasn’t as bad as you expect it to be, I couldn’t get rid of my nerves. But when we walked in, it was just as relaxed as they had described it. The guard barely looked at what we were wearing from what I could tell, and he merely used the wand to search us. The walls were much more colorful and animated than I thought they would be, the guards were friendly, and the inmates looked more or less excited to see us.

Some things that I noticed once we actually met the inmates:

One of the inmate’s had an intense tattoo on his forearm, and I had to catch myself multiple times from staring at it. I don’t know why I was so surprised that he had one, but I honestly was. He just looked incredibly young and innocent, so it was crazy to see it on him. I just kept wondering what the story behind it was. Why a dice and flames? Does that have significance for him? Or is that just a design he thought was cool?

It was much easier than I thought to keep a conversation going. I think since I’ve been meeting so many new people over the first month of college, I’ve gotten a lot better about not just keeping up small talk with someone new, but also opening up about myself. My partner, Christian, also had a lot of questions, so it was easy to go off his questions and start a conversation. There were moments though he would talk about life in prison when I didn’t know what to respond with. Sometimes I didn’t know what else to say except “that stinks” which seemed so useless. After sharing our I Am poems, he told me about how he had had to spend is 16th birthday in prison earlier that year, and he’d probably have to spend Christmas there too. To me, some of my favorite memories are from holidays and birthdays with my family, so I really felt for him when he said that he wouldn’t be able to spend that time with his family.

Phrase I noticed my partner repeating- “It’s whatever.” He said this a lot after he would open up to me and share something about his family or life outside of the facility, which I found really interesting.

I honestly feel stupid for even being nervous about coming into this experience. They’re just normal guys who made mistakes. They have dreams to go to college, they have favorite meals that their moms make for them, they are involved in student government (also sidetone: I found it so cool that the facility even offers that), they want to travel the US and the world, and they’re just guys who are excited to be making a connection with us.