In the summer of 2015, we started a podcast from within the walls of the Hays County Juvenile Detention Center (HCJC) as part of an ongoing, creative, linguistic curriculum. The original grassroots outreach was implemented in the summer of 2011 as an exercise in community building, and an exploration of creative curricula – poetry and writing – as potential platforms for storytelling, reflection, and Testimonio (Burgos, 1984). The incarcerated juvenile population in Texas, on any given day, is approximately 1,000-2,000 students aged 10-17 years old, with black and Latino children being 3-5 times more likely, than their white peers, to get detained. In 2012, Texas reported just over 70,000 students placed on juvenile probation, according to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department (2012). The HCJC in San Marcos, Texas is what the center director calls a “last chance to get it right” before the “cadets” risk being shipped to the rougher, scarier Texas Youth Commission, where more serious offenders reside. Students are shipped to the HCJC from cities and towns all over Texas, and their personal histories are vastly diverse. Our grassroots approach to delivering cutting-edge, creative curricula pushes against a cold machine of juvenile justice, giving rise to what Giroux (1997) calls “the different ‘voices’ students use to give meaning to their worlds”. Thus for 4 years, we wrote stories, poems, letters, and recollections—searching for George’s (1999) “societal wisdom…by using a fair amount of intuition and creativity…” (p.80), and creating our own space for educational opportunity within the walls. A juvenile detention facility is a somewhat chaotic system that breathes, burps, and binds in myriad ways each day. The staff is militarized in fatigues and drill calls, marching, chanting, and yelling at the detained students—visibly shaken, usually, and perplexing in their adaptive devices and strategies. Violence permeates the system, an ever-present line of distinction between control and a lack thereof.
The collected writings of the incarcerated students, aged 12-17 years, have been self-published perennially, and distributed to the newly published writers upon their respective releases, and also distributed throughout the HCJC as reading material for current incarcerated students. Coupled with the inherent catharsis through producing novel art behind bars, was and is a keen need for oral histories, hidden epistemologies, and meaning making to become digitally accessible. In 2013 we began creating audio files, to be merged with random still images downloaded from Google, quickly produced in iMovie, and uploaded to YouTube as original digital storytelling pieces (ACMI, 2005, Meadows, 2011). Interfacing with digital technology and creating content for the web while incarcerated, allows a student to engage their immediate experience, with a community, and reflect on their “membership” therein (Kervian & Mantae, 2016). Podcasting was a logical next step for our work at HCJC, to empower the students to claim ownership of their voice, and possibly bear a poetic witness for the voiceless (Forché, 1993). The proliferation of new technologies (e.g. podcasts), amid and among all low-income, underserved, and even incarcerated populations, cannot go unaddressed-untapped, and should be leveraged for platforms asking critique, employment of novel concepts, demonstrations of understanding, and expressions of modal empiricism (Kemp, Mellor, Kotter & Oosthoek, 2012). Podcasting is a relatively cheap, and distinctly empowering medium for creative, instructional, and social activities. After broadcasting a few episodes with the students, we came to find that learning, perhaps especially for a student who is incarcerated, can be viewed anew with such technology. Knowledge to Action within a juvenile detention facility in Texas, is a unique, interdisciplinary concept, fraught with border crossing and survival stories.
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