[staff] Exploring the Critical Juncture: Our New Program to Reach Incarcerated Youth through Virtual Worlds
This month we began working for the second time with librarians volunteering with incarcerated youth to think about how we could use virtual world technology in a way that would bring meaningful programming to these youth while incarcerated. As with the first time we worked with this very marginalized population (see my earlier post), we are again beginning to navigate the opportunities and challenges for working with youth while they are in jail.
While we have not yet been able to find a jail in the New York City boroughs that will allow for even the most remote access to Internet by incarcerated juveniles, we have been able to secure a partnership with Jail North in North Carolina and another jail in Madison, Wisconsin. It seems that just as we find disparity between the schools we work with in terms of access to technology and resources, the disparity across the treatment of youth while incarcerated, varies significantly across the country.
Our previous initiative with incarcerated youth was through a partnership with Ashoka’s Youth Venture “Dream it Do it” Initiative, which allowed for seed funding for youth around the world to launch social entrepreneurial programs to benefit their communities. This time, without a set program already in place, we have the opportunity to engage in a process with service providers at the jails to think critically about the kind of programming that would work best for these particular youth. Thus far, we are giving a lot of thought to a program that would explore the “critical juncture” in the lives of those incarcerated. This theme would ideally be broad enough that the young people could think on their own terms of what their critical juncture might mean for them individually. Their critical juncture could be as personal for the participant as exploring the decisions that eventually led to their incarceration, or something more abstract or distant, like reflecting on a book or song that really impacted them. A challenge will be making sure that if the incarcerated youth do share from a more personal place, that nothing they express through this program will be used against them in court. In that sense, we have to be incredibly cognizant of the role of this program in these young people’s lives. I look forward to thinking critically about what it means to reach more youth in U.S. jails through our Online Leadership Program and the role for new media as a whole, in strengthening programs for incarcerated youth.
We are planning to launch this six-week initiative in January of 2010, so check back for updates, as I will blog regularly on our progress.
