Today was my first day at Circleville correctional facility. It was definitely a lot calmer than I thought it would be. The facility was also a lot bigger than I thought. It was just about the same size as Scioto but planned out a more structured. The only thing was that Circleville has a lot more security measures. By that I mean it has a lot more barbed wire everywhere and fences. It’s a lot more controlled of a facility. Wherever there are poles they have greased them. It’s pretty intimidating. Today after getting a tour of the facility we got to break up into groups of two, I of course getting to be the group of 1. We were sent to different classes in the high schools; I got to sit in on a class about Sex Ed with a very interesting group of guys. It was interesting the way they used language. They were being pretty vulgar, and the teacher liked that I was the one telling them that the way they were speaking isn’t always the most polite. It was an interesting task and the teacher kept prompting me to answer things, I was really thrown head first into some pretty interesting and descriptive conversations. The guys were all really respectable though and its weird thinking that is where they live. They all seem so normal, just like kids I knew in high school. We had pretty limited contact with the guys today, other than playing in the gym with some of them; they were all pretty focused on basketball though. It was a pretty mild day. Tonight we got to go to an afterschool program at KIPP, a charter school in inner city Ohio. It’s in a rough spot of town. We got to hear some pretty interesting stories. The students we were with showed us different houses, which they could point to at the school, where drug dealers lived. They also showed us where a kid who went to school there got shot and was killed. It’s really shaken up the community. A retaliation gang had started up and it has all of the kids shaken up because they are actively recruiting and jumping kids after school. We heard some really heart breaking stories. One kid said that he was afraid of life, and another kid told us about how unsafe he feels. It was really difficult to sit in a room and listen to kids in 7th grade who have been through way more stuff than I have gone through. They speak with maturity and wisdom way beyond their years. It was jaw dropping and extremely eye opening. Tonight we got to meet Dr. Patti a director of social change at Ohio State University. She was a great speaker and she really gave us some background information on poverty. It was a factor that I really wasn’t thinking was the problem. I understood the behavior aspect and educational aspect of kids who ended up in the correctional facility. I can understand that if they fall behind in school and they need attention they can act out and end up in trouble. Things usually escalate from there, but I never really thought that poverty was the root of the problem. You really can’t understand something until you see it. Its like when it is staring right back at you it becomes so much more real. Dr. Patti had a great quote tonight that really rang in my ears, “You can’t be what you can’t see”. Dr. Patti is a really young scholar who grew up in these neighborhoods in section 8 housing and she can relate to the students at KIPP because at one point she was in their shoes. She is an amazing advocate for ending poverty. She was amazing that’s about all you can say, amazing. Tomorrow we have another afterschool program to go to as well as a long morning and mid-afternoon at Circleville. We learned so much tonight its hard to write it all down, but I fell like writing as much as I can and putting down as much as I see and hear is really helping me reflect and to think about my own life.
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