“The Value of Process: Creating theatre with incarcerated youth” in Applied Theater with Youth, eds. Lisa Brenner, Chris Ceraso, Evelyn Diaz Cruz (New York: Routledge, 2021).

“It’s weird. They all seem so young, and sweet, and innocent. They look just like me and my friends did a few years ago. But I know that they’re here for a reason. That they’ve all done something wrong and that’s why they’re here. Still though, it feels really weird coming to see them. Because it feels like they could be me.”

These are the concluding thoughts of my first (mandatory) journal entry after concluding my first theatre workshop in a girl’s detention facility just outside of Detroit, Michigan. Rereading those words as I write this reminds me of how long ago it was, how distant that former self feels from the person I am now. How much I have changed, and how much I have learned from people who I thought I was there to teach.

This chapter will serve as a combination of narrative and subsequent analysis of my experiences working with incarcerated and justice-involved youth. I will use my experiences to ground a discussion of the role of Freirean pedagogy and dialogics as tools in which young people coming from drastically different circumstances can learn from and humanize one another.