Some afternoons, I travel to a green-roofed building to drop off a publication whose pages are falling apart. They aren’t stapled or even glued, just prone to gravity if you don’t grip the spine tightly enough. Apart from this, the delivery is seamless. I speak with a muffled voice over phone, they tell me someone will be right out, I hand off the pages, and I’m on my way.  

The poorly bound publication is called The Beat Within. It contains writing and artwork by incarcerated youth from around the country. As for the building, it’s the Missoula County Juvenile Detention Center. Some of the young people published in The Beat and sentenced to the detention center are writing students of Free Verse, a creative writing nonprofit—and one of my service sites—serving in Montana’s juvenile detention centers. 

It wasn’t until a few months into my term with Free Verse that I realized why there weren’t staples: they’re banned from jails and prisons. Carceral spaces are volatile and unpredictable places, and even the smallest bit of metal could lead to a hazardous situation. 

Part of serving with Free Verse involves learning about things that are unfamiliar to me. While I may not be in a formal classroom, I’m still gathering bits of wisdom about the carceral system and those caught up in it. Sometimes this knowledge is small like the staples missing from The Beat Within. Other times, it’s revelatory, such as the writings of kids submitting for publication. 

The nature of carceral spaces makes knowledge like this difficult to gather. While one might be able to see through prison bars, there is a whole other tangle of materials between the broader public and the incarcerated. Cinderblocks, buzzing doors, and barbed wire fences create an opaqueness which inhibits communication between these two groups. Aside from a jail or prison’s architecture, there is also location. Sometimes, a carceral space lies behind the rolling plains of a rural expanse. Other times, it is hidden in plain sight. For instance, the Missoula County Juvenile Detention Center is only a short stroll from strip malls. If you’ve driven to Zootown’s Target or REI, there is a good chance that you have unknowingly passed it on the way. 

Part of being an informed and participatory citizen, I think, means listening to experiences from persons like those served by Free Verse. It entails an active search for avenues which tell the stories of folks we may forget. Truthfully, just because someone is mostly invisible does not mean that they stop being a part of our community; a conviction does not sentence them to irrelevance in our hearts and minds. Instead, incarcerated citizens challenge us. Their situations test us to see how extensive our capacity for empathy is. It calls us to ask questions about the state of justice and its relationship to factors like race, gender, and class. 

Since last year, Free Verse has been putting out a series called the Quaranzine. Each zine is a short publication of students’ writing. The second installment of the series, titled Where the Place Comes Alive, came out in December. As one of my VISTA responsibilities, I had the pleasure of revising and distributing the recent booklet. One poem, “Untitled” by RK, moved me in particular. While I cannot reprint the entire poem here, the most hard-hitting sentences are the last few: “I’m taking a hit and going to prison for some [stuff] I didn’t even do. Why? Because I’m loyal.” In reading their poem’s finale, I didn’t meet a writer driven by a life of crime. I did meet was a kid who is—they said it best—loyal, who teaches me that others aren’t expendable for your own comfort; it’s wrong to throw people under the bus. If I would have written RK off as a criminal and chosen not to listen, I would have never set myself up to read something so powerful. While I may not be able to meet them face-to-face in a visitation room, I can still see their humanity as my eyes scan the page, that they have something important to share. 

I’m approaching the halfway mark of my service, and I am blessed to say that I’ll be able to look at more writing like RK’s as I continue to assist with editing and publication compilation for my site. Really, I’m looking forward to it. And Free Verse’s final installment of the Quaranzine is forthcoming. While the best part of this is surely the swaths of stellar poems traveling through the office, there’s an added bonus: the Quaranzine has staples. It’s easy to read.