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All the Jail's a Stage

Continued from page 4

John's shaky voice trails off. "If you were someone who wasn't you, how would you read it? Like who's your favorite rapper?" asks Agnes Wilcox at a hip-hop workshop sponsored by Prison Performing Arts.

John says his favorite is Lil' Wayne.

"How would Lil' Wayne read it?" Wilcox asks.

John's classmates chime in with their advice. "Give the man some time," Wilcox says firmly. "How would he start it? Is Lil' Wayne quiet? Is he loud? Go for it!"

John continues, this time louder. His back straightens. His classmates lean forward.

"Everywhere I went/Everywhere someone wanted to fight/Sometimes I walked away/Sometimes I had to fight."

"Yeah, yeah! You sound like the real deal!" Wilcox yells from the back of the room. "Who is this for? Is this for your brother? Read the last two lines real loud, for your brother."

John finds his voice again and shouts his words: "I'm a smart young man/But sometimes I don't listen."

"Way cool, man," Wilcox applauds. All the teenage boys crack up.

"Oh, I'm sorry, am I not allowed to say that?" she chuckles. "Because we used to say it back before you were born, man. We might be old, but we had slang back then too!"

"Agnes -- this lady has so much energy, she amazes me sometimes," says Charles Reid, assistant superintendent of the juvenile detention center. "She's brought the symphony, jazz groups, choirs, theater. The things she's exposed these kids to, they probably would have never seen."

Many of the boys and girls incarcerated at the juvenile detention center cannot read or write proficiently and struggle to express themselves. And most of these kids, whose ages range from eight to sixteen, are eaten up with anger, sadness and fear.

"We do a lot of crying here," Reid says. "They talk about not living to be twenty. They tell me about their friends being killed. Can you imagine a kid being sixteen and never having a birthday party or never seeing his father?"

Eighty percent of the kids in the city juvenile detention center will re-offend and find themselves here again for one to three months, awaiting trial. When they turn seventeen, many will end up in the state prison system.

"[Prison Performing Arts] is something that gives them confidence in themselves," Reid explains. "But it goes away when they leave here."

Wilcox would like to break that trend. She's hoping to start a program that will offer drama classes to juvenile offenders after they return home. Maybe then she won't see these same kids in prison in a few years. And maybe they can avoid the tragedies of Shakespeare's characters.

The last performer at the hip-hop workshop stands up to deliver his rap: "This place is a living Hell/And I am ready to go home/I am tired of being held back/I am ready to move on/My mind is getting cluttered up with words/That's pretty strong/They say I am a criminal/I say they are wrong."

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