When sophomore Laura Miller heard about former inmates’ experiences in juvenile detention facilities, she wanted to find a way to give young people in the justice system a voice.
After listening to advocates for the Just Kids Partnership — a nonprofit against charging incarcerated youths as adults — the management major knew she could lead a program on the campus to help reach this goal.
“Once you kind of hear about it, how can you not get involved?” Miller said. “After seeing those who have had experiences with it and came out and advocated — it’s just so powerful.”
Miller is in charge of a pen-pal program that involves sending letters and poems back and forth with incarcerated youth. The program was created by The Voice, a student group that aims to connect students with imprisoned youth and simultaneously advocate for juvenile-justice reform.
The 50 university students participating along with Miller will write to about 30 incarcerated youth members ages 15 to 21 for four weeks through the English class poetry unit at the New Beginnings Detention Facility in Laurel. The students in The Voice received their first letters yesterday.
The participants and those incarcerated will send original or famous poems to one another, said Danielle Van Horn, a program volunteer. The detention center will send the letters or poems on Tuesdays, and the university students will send letters or poems on Fridays.
“We identify these incarnated youths as members of society because they tend to get overlooked when they get out, and we want them to know that they are heard,” Miller said.
Junior elementary education major Karla Luetzow, who also is in charge of the pen-pal program, said the group began planning the project in the fall. The group became inspired to create the program after taking part in the Rawlings Undergraduate Leadership Fellows Program at this university, in which local leaders, faculty and alumni help prepare students interested in advocacy for leadership roles.
Luetzow said the letters will be anonymous, but each pen pal will be writing to the same person by numbering pairs.
Van Horn, a junior mathematics major and aspiring teacher, said she got involved in the program because she wants to be able to connect with any student, regardless of their experiences.
“I thought it would be a good way to learn how to build relationships with different kinds of youth, since I’ll have a very diverse group of students,” she said.
The project has not been costly because the group only paid for the poetry notebooks to be sent to the detention facility, Luetzow said. The poetry shared through this program will be posted on the group’s blog this month.
“We’ve been talking with advocates to see how it’s going to work best for the community and how to communicate with them,” Luetzow said.
The group determined the Laurel detention facility was the “most responsive” to their project’s mission, Luetzow said.
Van Horn said she hopes this program raises awareness among college students in the same age group as the detained youth members.
“They will eventually have to be rehabilitated back into society, and as a society, we need to be aware [of] that when they are released,” Van Horn said. “We can’t just look at them as this bad person forever or we’re never going to be able to help them redeem themselves or allow them to socialize the way they want to.”
Van Horn said it’s also important for this university’s students to reach out to and accept the younger population of people incarcerated, who could be forgotten about.
The group plans to visit the detention facility for the first time on May 7, Luetzow said.
“We will hear the youth read their poetry journals, which includes the poems that they sent us and the poems that we sent them,” she said.
