In 2006, a friend asked me to speak at Career Day at the school where she taught. At the time I was writing a syndicated humor column, and apparently she thought the kids might be interested in learning what it was like to write sophomoric jokes for a living.
What made these kids unusual that they were locked up. They were male juvenile offenders at the WJ Maxey Boys Training School in Whitmore Lake, MI.
As the day approached, I didn’t really know what to expect. I had seen the facility before, but never had any experience with whoever was behing the razor wire fences. Based on what people had told me over the years, all I knew was that it was some kind of place where “bad kids” lived. The night before, I stayed awake wondering what I would see in a prison for children.
The first time you go into a prison is a unique experience. You empty your pockets into a locker, go through a metal detector, then pass through a seried of “sally ports” – tiny airlocks-ish passages with doors at both ends, where you can’t go through the second door until the first door is securely locked behind you. Cameras cover every angle, it’s obvious that you’re being watched.
This is clearly not summer camp.
The way the day was set up, I was to to spend the next few hours in the facility’s library, while groups of kids from the various “pods,” or living units, were brought to me. I would talk to each pod for 45 minutes, then they would leave and I’d get another one.
Waiting in the library for the first group of boys, I was struck by how bright and clean everything was. I browsed through the books, and I noticed that there were an awful lot of romance novels on the shelves. And those bodice-ripping paperbacks had a lot of miles on them. Interesting.
And then came the first group. They were all walking in a straight line, with their arms folded and their right shoulders along the wall. They all wore baggy yellow t-shirts, khaki pants, and tennis shoes with no laces. They all had black GPS locator bracelets riveted around their left wrists. They were black, and white, and brown. And they were kids.
Our kids.
