45 pages • 1 hour read
True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall
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Themes
Maturity and Growth
An important theme of True Notebooks is maturity. As the book primarily deals with young offenders, each of the students demonstrates a state of immaturity. Unfortunately, these different variants of immaturity are always relevant in their criminal history, and while none of the inmates of Central Juvenile Hall are reducible to their crimes, they are an unavoidable part of their personality and life history. The latter of these is the truth Mark realizes slowly, a realization hampered by the distance of his own life circumstance to theirs, and his desire to bond with them.
The former, however, reflects the possibility for change. This change is more relevant for youths, and made more tragic due to the length of their respective sentences. The legal system does not take into consideration the possibility of growth and change, but ironically, instills its own changes in individuals, through incarceration. The possibility of leniency is rarely extended to these inmates, given the grievous nature of these crimes. This is worsened by the environment of the prison, which further enforces these narrow ideas, and leaves little possibility for growth.
Critical to this process of maturation is the boys' realization that they can change, and that the attempts to "define" them must not succeed. The writing program has an important function in this: through this creative expression, the students learn and rediscover aspects of themselves that they normally suppress. One of the motivations of Mark's class is to give the students a chance to resume the open-ended growth that would normally transpire outside of prison.
Family and Community
Family is a critical theme of True Notebooks. Particularly, the characters of the book find themselves in situations where family situations—traditional or non-traditional—are unstable, toxic, or simply absent. Much of the action in True Notebooks takes place amid a backdrop of filial bonding. Even in the writing class, the process of forming bonds of trust is a long and difficult one. Many of the crimes are gang-related, and it is the pseudo-family atmosphere of a gang which both draws in young men and incites them to violence. However, there is a strong practical aspect to this behavior, in that gangs provide both physical and emotional security for these boys; being outside of a gang can be as hazardous as being in a gang. Furthermore, gangs offer a sense of visibility, recognition, and respect that many of the boys lack in their lives and their communities. Mr. Sills tells Mark that inmates respect those who hold them accountable. Mark does not understand this at first; his intuitive response is that the already-regimented environment of prison life grinds the young inmates down. Having a looser style of classroom, he reasons, would be a welcome relief. However, he ultimately infuses his classroom with more structure. In this more structured environment, the students are better able to express themselves, and value themselves and their time more. This was a prime mechanism of gang life—challenging and testing, as much as welcoming and recognizing. Mark eventually understands that these young adults all wish to make something of themselves, a desire which he, failing to teach and hold them to task, has unintentionally thwarted. When Mark begins to think about these dynamics in terms of family and friendship, his thinking changes: he realizes that among adults (as these young people are about to become), holding each other accountable is as important as anything else.
Responsibility and Freedom
All of the inmates have had negative circumstances in their lives, greater than Mark has experienced. Mark initially believes that these mitigate their crimes, but goes back on that belief. A much more complicated dynamic emerges: while in the moment, and shortly after their arrests, the young inmates of Central Juvenile Hall will feel that their choices were limited, and they were less responsible for their crimes. However, with time, the boys almost always acknowledge their own crimes, although with regret. Accepting this regret, along with the loss of their freedom once incarcerated, ironically becomes a sign of the freedom they had then, prior to committing their respective crimes.
For these offenders, they understand that their freedom is the price they paid for their choices, and the harm their choices have created. However, few understand, in the moment, what is at stake when these choices are made. While this is largely a function of their relative immaturity, it is also the failure of those responsible for them at that time: their families and communities. However, this idea is undoubtedly controversial. The source of this controversy is that this argument seems to take away the offenders' responsibility, and place that responsibility upon an abstract entity, such as society, when it is clear this is not always the case. However, the cases at Central Juvenile Hall feature a troubling proportion of offenders raised in situations of abuse, drugs, and crime, as well as near-universal poverty. While none of these for certain can make an individual commit a crime, they all create motivations and deficits for which crime seems an increasingly acceptable "solution."It is this kind of highly-situational, pressured decision-making that Mark, the staff, and most importantly the students are aware of, but struggle to express. And while the writing course provides some outlet for these feelings, it does not take away the consequences of these former actions.
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