Freedom in Confinement
By Clarise Larson | Updated April 25, 2021 | Read the Montana Kaimin Article
In Project Free Verse, the classroom has no windows. Instead, there is a one-way mirror and cameras watching every move. A red button is installed somewhere, which the poetry teacher, Taylor White, can press if danger were to arise. She doesn’t actually know where the button is, nor has she ever needed it in her seven years teaching at the Missoula Juvenile Detention Center.
Every class session looks like this: In walk the students in their orange jumpsuits. They shuffle, actually, because the orange sandals they wear are typically too big, and they have to fight to keep them from falling off their feet.
The conditions might sound like a plea for more education funding. However, the Free Verse Project has dedicated itself to giving incarcerated school-aged children their most powerful resource.
“Thank you Free Verse, you’ve given me the ability to show people who I am,” said one student at the end of a class in the summer of 2020. “I know now I can show people who I am, tell it like it is: That I’m not just a bad person, that I have a story to tell and that I’m powerful. That I can touch people with my words. You guys inspire me.”
The goal has always been simple: Give these kids a voice beyond the cinder block walls.
Free Verse partners directly with Montana corrections centers to teach poetry to incarcerated youth. The organization is a certified 501c3 nonprofit based out of Missoula, Montana, whose mission is to give a creative outlet to incarcerated youth in Montana and give them a voice. Because of the pandemic, the kids are even more isolated from the outside.
All of them too young to vote, most of them too young to drive and some even too young to enter middle school, the students sit with hands crossed behind their backs.
“I think the youngest I have taught, I would conservatively say, was 11 years old,” White said about her experience teaching with Free Verse.
At their respective desks, the children wait for White to start the Free Verse lesson for the day.
Before Free Verse entered into partnerships with juvenile detention centers across Montana, incarcerated kids were not given much opportunity to express their creativity, or to share it outside of the detention center’s walls. Free Verse changed that.
Since the pandemic, though, things are different.
Instead of the Free Verse teachers standing in the front of the room, able to interact with each student at their own leisure, they are now only a talking head projected on the white cinder block walls. Some of the correctional centers have computers for the kids to use, but most don’t.
The solution: Move the paper a little closer to the only camera so that the teacher might be able to read it through the screen — if she squints her eyes hard enough.
So much of the political and social conversations in Montana have left the voices of these children out, said Nicole Gomez, the current executive director of Free Verse.
“We want to get these voices out there. We want them to realize that they have a story to tell and that their story is powerful, and to push back against some of those labels and reclaim their own narrative,” Gomez said.
White said many of these kids were never given the opportunity to be and act like actual kids. Before the pandemic, the typical class size was 20-25 kids. Now, it’s around 8-10.
“You see some real baby faces. Though they look like kids, when they speak and write and communicate, it is clear that they already know what it is to encounter prejudice, poverty, violence, addiction, social stigma, loss, loneliness and helplessness,” White said.
Prisoners who participate are able to create and maintain their identity in the face of the erosion they feel in a prison environment, and the stigma attached to the status of being a prisoner, said Paul Clement, a researcher at the University of London.
Much of the kids’ poetry features distant parents, hiding from violence and trying to hide from the prejudice faced in Montana.
“They have been forced to grow up faster than your average kid, and forced to relinquish all sense of control. So there is this hard-earned maturity in the room and in their writing,” Gomez said.
Free Verse was established in 2014, born out of a group of students studying to get their Master of Fine Arts at the University of Montana, many of them working toward degrees in creative writing, English and literature.
The group of MFA students wanted to connect more to Missoula’s community, starting with some radical changes they wanted to see in Montana. The idea was to give a creative outlet and voice to a group in Montana that didn’t really have one. One of the students, Sarah Kahn, turned the idea into a reality.
On a bike ride past the Missoula Juvenile Detention Center, Kahn wondered if there were any creative writing opportunities offered to incarcerated youth at the jail. She looked into it and found there wasn’t.
So, with the help of other MFA students, they founded a volunteer program and began teaching poetry and literature at the jail every single day.
But volunteering wasn’t enough.
They wanted to turn the volunteer teaching positions into actual paid teaching positions — a nonprofit where they could reach more kids across Montana.
The group officially became a nonprofit in Montana, and began getting funding through grants and donations in order to begin paying teachers to work full time.
The organization partners with the three detention centers across the state, including the Missoula Juvenile Detention Center, the Billings Juvenile Detention Center and Pine Hills Youth Correctional Facility. Though Free Verse wants to reach as many places in Montana as they can, that’s not the organization’s ultimate goal.
“Our dream is to shut down our organization because there are no halls left,” the team said in a statement on their website.
Free Verse has published poems by hundreds of these kids, and they are only a fraction of the juveniles detained in Montana.
Nicole Gomez holds two of the instructional books that she uses to teach her classes. All teaching is done virtually and teachers use a combination of online resources and hard copy books to teach their classes.