I feel my life is a war, living in a place that is really crazy. People die every day in Rochester, and all I can do is hope that it's not someone from my family or a close friend. Coming to jail has made me want to change my life around. I am happy to be where I am and not dead or hurt. I am learning new things. When I was going to school, I was mad at the officers for making me go to school every day or locking me in. Then one day I came to school and a woman by the name of Dale Davis was there. She was talking about a lot of things, and I was like, "She really doesn't know what she's talking about." She was a white woman talking about rappers that I thought she didn't have a clue about. Then I went to The Jimmy Santiago Baca Library, Writing, and Publishing Center. For the first time it felt like I wasn't in jail the whole time I was there, but I was in jail. I learned there are really people who care about us young men. I didn't think people cared that much. It's not like our schools outside of jail. In The Jimmy Santiago Baca Library, Writing, and Publishing Center I see what I am really able to do and there is help there when I need it. It is easy to learn things there that I never in my lifetime thought I could do.

Clarence

When she started filming we read our poems and diaries, talking about how we feel in jail. When she started filming me in my cell, my heart was pumping a hundred beats per minute, and my hands were shaking. I was very nervous not because of the camera but about the feelings I was letting everybody else know about me.  These were things that I wouldn't talk to my dog about.

A film on the importance of writing for us incarcerated youth shows people how we feel being locked up and how we can put our minds, that we never knew we had, to the test.  I want people to learn that just because we made a mistake we are not bad people; we just have to get up, wipe off the dirt, and do it again and again until we get it right.

I think that other kids should see the film to show them how we think we're big and bad, but really we're hurting.

What is writing to me?
Writing to me is a sense to know me,
to show people who I am,
to get out the pain and hurt,
to tell people that it really hurts.
I write to find who I really am,
to tell people not about clothes and shiny cars,
to tell people I want to go higher than stars,
farther than far.

Writing to me isn't easy, it's hard.

Derrell

The New York State Literary Center's Incarcerated Education Program was honored with an invitation to participate in The Anne Frank Center's "Hello World: Diaries by Men and Women in American Prisons." 

In an effort to reach out to prisoners and educate people on both sides of the "wall," The Anne Frank Center USA, in partnership with PEN American Center, launched a Prison Diary Program for men and women in American prisons using the Diary of Anne Frank as an inspirational tool. The program encouraged prisoners to utilize the same means of self-expression—writing a diary—that Anne used to endure her imprisonment while in hiding. The Anne Frank Center's diary writing program provided prisoners with a copy of A Diary of a Young Girl, a journal, and a pamphlet on diary writing and Anne Frank's literary accomplishments. Participants agreed to keep their own diaries, writing about their lives and thoughts, and returning their journals to The Anne Frank Center for possible publication on the Internet and in print.

Freedom of Expression: An Exhibition of Contemporary Diaries, May 1 - July 1, 2010, The Anne Frank Center USA, 38 Crosby Street, New York, New York

The exhibition of diaries featured contemporary diaries, a facsimile of Anne Frank's original diary, some of the Freedom Writers' diaries, diaries by men and women in prison, and the diaries of the incarcerated youth in NYSLC's Incarcerated Education Program.

New York State Literary Center at the opening of Freedom of Expression: An Exhibition of Contemporary Diaries at The Anne Frank Center USA in New York

Dale Davis with Melanie Hibbert (center)

The Diaries of the Incarcerated Youth in NYSLC's Incarcerated Education Program 
Click to view PDF file

Dale Davis worked with with Erie County Youth Detention Facility as a consultant to design a program for the Youth Detention Facility based upon the success NYSLC's Incarcerated Education Program.

McGraw-Hill's College and Career Readiness Student Focus Website featured the writing and audio of incarcerated youth participating NYSLC's Incarcerated Education Program. NYSLC's mission, pedagogy, resources, and research focusing upon the strengths of young people, were presented by McGraw-Hill as testimony to the power of expression and that incarceration does not have to be an end.

Change by Kevin

Dale Davis was invited to present on NYSLC's Incarcerated Education Program and to chair a panel on employing arts integration with underserved populations to foster cultural understanding and unleash students' creativity to prepare students to tackle today's pressing issues at College Board Forum - The College Board in New York City.

The idea for Murals for The Visiting Rooms https://www.nyslc.org/visitingroommural.htm began with "I Am" poems written by fourth grade students at Dag Hammarskjold, School #6, Rochester City School District. Dale Davis shared the poems with incarcerated youth in NYSLC's programs at Monroe County Jail and Monroe Correctional Facility, along with the poems, statistics and research on children whose parents are incarcerated were introduced. The incarcerated youth at both facilities became determined to reach out to young children affected by incarceration. After much discussion the idea of Murals for the Visiting Rooms at both Monroe County Jail and Monroe Correctional Facility to facilitate communication between children and their parents and siblings who are incarcerated took seed.  The incarcerated youth put their thoughts and ideas into writing, sharing, and discussing them. Visual Artist Margo Muto guided and helped develop the murals with the youth.

Statistics and mug shots do not have dreams. The young men and women with whom I work in the New York State Literary Center's programs are adolescents who have been arrested as adults. They are invisible in a system that so many enter at ten or eleven as juveniles, go from the juvenile justice system to jail to prison. They are invisible in a system that controls their lives. 

When Toyota did not work, we looked at why. When children's medications were not working, we recalled.

If we leave out the voices of those most effected by the system, it is a one-way street that ends in prison.

The young men and women with whom I work have ideas and thoughts they have never expressed. No one ever asked. There was no time. Existence means survival on the streets. If you hurt inside, really hurt because your father is not there, because you have witnessed your brother murdered, because a parent is in jail, you act out in school. Labels are easier than caring to find out why. Labels stick. In effect you are in a prison.  

Our children feel deserted and surrounded by a void of meaningless.

I have come to know young people through their writing. We read. We talk. We write. We read. We share. We learn to trust one another.

The young people reflect and stop and wonder who they are, where they have been, and where they want to go. Writing opens the floodgates to belief in themselves. 

Dale Davis
May 6, 2010