Voices of Detained Youth: 'I Never Knew I Would Be in a Cell'

Summary

---

I can be real impatient. If my mother didn't have money to pay bills, I wouldn't have the patience to wait for her to get a job. I would go out and sell drugs. I can be real money-hungry, so I might rob somebody. Maybe it's because of the adrenaline rush, meaning the excitement, the "Whoo!" that you get when you rob somebody or rob a store. You feel your heart beating fast, and then you're scared. You get hyped when you get chased by the cops-especially when you don't get caught. That was fun. I didn't get caught the next day. I got caught a week after.

I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm praying to God that I go home. If I go home or if I go upstate, I'm going to cry either way. Tears are still going to run down my eyes. If I go home, I'm going to be happy. I'll be on my Ps and Qs. Even if I don't go home, I'm still going to be on my best behavior. There's always a time to change. You've got to think positive if you don't go home. There might be a reason why you didn't. A lot of things could happen while you're on the outside. You could get raped, stabbed. You never know.

I'm just like my mother. My mother and I sit down, and I ask, "What's the new song?" She'll try to make a little beat. She starts drumming and then starts dancing. I'm going, "Hey! Hey!" and everybody's looking at us, and they say, "You two stop!" I don't know. It's just me and my mom.

A good percentage of kids in good neighborhoods who go to private schools do more drugs than people who go to public school, that live in the so-called 'hood.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

Voices of Detained Youth: 'I Never Knew I Would Be in a Cell'

This is the fifth in a series of articles from young women attending classes at Passages Academy in the Horizon Juvenile Center, a detention center in the South Bronx. Each article is a first-person narration edited from a group disc...

See the full content of this document

---