Diversity. [Entry #4]

Share a Tale of Diversity.

I have yet to leave the country borders. Until two years ago, I had yet to leave the Eastern Time Zone.
The first time I did escape an hour or two from my comfort zone was on the youth choir tour with my church. We don't go to different churches performing, we go in to prisons. These last two years we only went to juvenile detention centers with the exception of one penitentiary.
[This was primarily because three years ago, in Riker's Island, a gang fight broke out during our performance... It was an experience to share another time...]
What's so bizarre about going into juvenile detention centers is that the people we're singing to aren't the hardcore thugs that we see on TV. It's not really that way all the time in penitentiaries either. Whenever we first enter a prison, there's a specific order of entry that's taken, especially at co-ed facilities.
Our guys enter first and set up our risers, band, sound system, everything.
Then our girls enter. The guys stand in front of us or between any windows that lead to where the inmates are held. Then we sit upright, with our knees together, on the risers.
Then the male inmates enter with their guards. Several profane gestures are shrugged off, but anything too out of hand is an automatic removal... Most haven't seen a female in several months or even years, despite being in a co-ed facility, as they're kept separate until we come around.
Then the girls get escorted in. The male inmates have to keep facing forward, and the girls are sat down in the back so that they aren't objectified...
The point of this is that it's all very systematic, and when the inmates are escorted in, they're not quite as hard core as they were outside the pen. Sure, things happen, but when they know the consequences that will come if they try to show out for us, they step down.
In one prison last year, once the males were escorted out at the end, and we were allowed to go talk to the girls for a while. I'm mighty sheltered, but it was bizarre getting to talk to them, learn their names, learn what they did, learn about their families. Two girls were pregnant, several were only in there for running away, some had kids at home with their parents, some had just skipped school too many days.
The most disorienting thing that this experience taught us was how while we see ourselves as all high and mighty for keeping ourselves out of jail by not murdering anyone, something as simple as missing school too many days in Alabama could land you in jail. They're still girls our age, with friends, social lives, who just slipped up one too many times. While sure they might have been raised differently, but they're still girls who enjoy being social, having a family, etc. they're still girls with the same hopes and aspirations as us. They're really not that different...