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Michael Kroll Staff Member of The Beat Within www.thebeatwithin.org Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Lee: Tell us about your involvement with The Beat Within, and how long have you been working with the program. Michael Kroll: I actually have a very long involvement in the criminal justice system, I've been writing about it for about 25 to 30 years. I'm the oldest person in The Beat Within family and I sort of moved into it while I was doing other work, that is, I started way back at the very beginning, I was in the very fist workshop we did at Alameda County, the Oakland Juvenile hall, which I think was in 1997. And I ran workshops in that county for a while, for a couple of years, as a volunteer, not as a staff of The Beat Within. I was also doing death penalty mitigation work...that is what I do, as well as write, as well as do this... that means I actually get involved in real cases in which my job is to find the kind of information and evidence that would spare a man's life... that would tell a jury why this guilty man should live and not die, that is my job. And it is a very, very all consuming job, so when you take a case like that you really can't do anything, BUT that. So in 1999 I got involved in a very high profile murder case involving multiple victims and lots of newspaper, television, etc. and so I was completely taken in by that and for the next 3 years, between 1999 and 2002, I did that case only, so I was no longer doing The Beat. But at the end of that case, David Inocencio, the director of The Beat, called on me and asked if I'd be willing to come back in any capacity, and I said I would be willing to come back in ANY capacity and so I was hired full time as an associate editor, and that is what I have been doing. Everyone here does everything here, so I do everything here too, workshops, writing, editing, etc. L: What experience did you bring to The Beat Within and what experience have you acquired? M: The experience I brought to The Beat Within, primarily is having written extensively on the criminal justice system for all those years, 25 or more. Including having written fairly extensively on juvenile justice, and including having a pretty major...a magazine cover story on the CYA itself. So I was pretty familiar with the state wide system when this program started. I also had been writing for Pacific News Service, for many years, 20 years, which is the parent organization in the office in which The Beat is housed, so it was kind of a natural bridge for me to have one foot in the PNF (Pacific News Service) family, the writing family, and one foot in The Beat family, because of the subject I wrote about. And what have I learned?... I've learned things that, in a way, all of us already know, but they have been reconfirmed and reemphasized, which is that, every human being is worth something. That if people as children are not valued and their voices are not valued, and they are seen and received as kind of invaluable, they begin to incorporate that view of themselves, and they find themselves invaluable, and having nothing about you to say since no one credits their having anything to say, so what you learn of course very quickly, is "oh that's bullshit". That young people have a lot of things that are very important to say, not just about the system, but about themselves, their lives, their souls, their aspirations, their hopes, and their children's kind of view of the world. You learn that you are dealing with children and they are not adults, whatever the system calls them, all those things you learn. And I think anyone that does this work would learn those things as if they didn't know them already. L: As a staff member, what challenges do you face when you walk into these workshops and your hoping to encourage the youth to write? M: I think, some of the challenges are just sort of basic 7th grade kind of challenges, that is, sometimes these young people...they are Young People, they are still young and they are very exuberant and full of energy. So one of the problems you run into is a very basic classroom problem, which is just keeping order and telling people that this is a serious operation, and we don't have to be here and if you don't want to take it seriously that's fine but please leave because other people do want to take it seriously. So there's that policing function of saying please be quiet, please shut up, please have some respect, someone's talking please listen, those kind of problems. And then there are problems with staff, certainly by no means all, there are some very, very dedicated staff who work with the program, but there are also staff who are just there for their paycheck and it doesn't matter what program, they view all programs as kind of bothersome to them, as out of the routine, and they will talk during the workshop, or play the television during a workshop or yell back and forth to other staff during a workshop, and though I can tell a young person be quiet, be respectful, I can't tell a staff person that way. So there are times where you have to bite your tongue, where you in other context might speak up and say, "wait, there is something going on here", and because we are a guest in the system and it's easy for them to ban us. I have had one incident in the years I've been working with The Beat Within in which a young person, offensively threatened me, seemed to try to take me hostage using a pencil to the neck as a weapon, but to be fair, and the staff was very eager for me to prosecute this kid, I refused to do that because I never felt it was serious, I never felt seriously threatened. It wasn't a joke, but I knew from the beginning that he certainly wasn't going to do me any harm; it was some stupid scheme of his to escape. As I was saying we are dealing with kids here, thought is not necessarily their strong point, or they wouldn't be where they are often, but anyway, that is the only incident that might be described as the kind of thing that the general public would fear going into any kind of prison or jail, but, as I said, I thought it was just a gesture, and in all the years that I have done it, it is the only thing that falls in that category of criminal activity. Other than that, I have no problems, it is the high point of the week going into the workshops, the real problems are just in the production of the magazines, not in dealing with the young people. L: What approach do you take to try to appeal to the audience that you work with? M: I think that to me... it's the strength of The Beat Within….. is that each of us is an individual and so my approach is simply to be myself and respond to people in my own voice and with my own opinions. As long as they know that I am not saying that my opinion is better than their opinion, its really a dialogue, so my approach really is to...when I hear something that I think is absurd, or doesn't have the justification or...the justification hasn't been provided I'll challenge the kid and say, well you said that but I don't hear any argument that supports that view, how do you come to that view? And so we will have this little dialogue, and that dialogue continues in The Beat itself because we respond to each piece. So it may well be that a dialogue I have with a kid in the unit gets repeated or amplified on in a written response, and then it goes on the next week, where the kid would have thought about what I have said, and challenge it or challenge me or say "I see what you are talking about" or "I didn't explain myself well enough, this is what I really meant"...so it becomes a kind of...it takes time to develop relationships and the strength of The Beat Within is its relationships so a lot of the young people that I deal with...a lot of my dealings with them in the beginning are quite different from my dealings with them in the end...because in the beginning they naturally don't trust me, I'm just another white man in their lives, another adult that is going to betray them and I can understand why it takes a while for them to realize that we are going to come back each week and they are not going to be able to scare us off. And we are going to be able to hear that they are "posted on the block, and we're packing a glock and we smoked a rock", and all those flows... and we are not going to get turned off and we are not going to say "geeze, how could you do that?"...but we are going to engage them as people, and I think ultimately that pays off in a sense that they then engage you as a person, and you and I are no longer, or each of us no longer become a kind of stereotype because we all have our stereotypes. We go in with our views, we being the general public, of who young people are that are locked up, but of course young people that are locked up have their own stereotypes of who we are. And I think that those stereotypes get broken down over time as people get to know one another. L: From those that you have worked with, are people more prone to volunteer, or volunteer after encouragement? M: My experience with that is that you don't need a lot of prompting to get them to ask, "is there a place for me, I'm getting out in a month, I'm getting out next week, can you hire me, can you put me to work." And often its not even hiring, often I will say to these young people, "well there is always work to do but we don't know if from day to day, if whether we will have money. So you might come in and be told, geeze we can't pay you anything." But there is work to be done, and most of the time...I guess this is a vision, so kids will say, "hell no I can work for McDonalds and make more money", and other kids will say, "I don't need money, I just need a place, I just need to go somewhere." And so those people come in and they are family. So I don't think it takes much encouragement, sometimes it takes encouragement to get kids to write about particular things...some kid might be having a particular problem and I'll suggest a strategy for writing about in a way that they can write about it. Maybe not directly but indirectly, that's where encouragement is important and sticking to it with a particular individual who has a particular problem, but in general, no, I think this is a very popular program and I think it is based on that sense that you are part of a family. L: As an editor of the work that is submitted from the contributors, what do you look for when determining what will "not" be published? M: We have some basic rules, although those basic rules sometimes require, well often require subjectivity, sort of contextual...but pieces that really say nothing, that just are words for the sake of words, and you can find them quickly, I mean, they are just nonsense...they don't make any point at all except, "here I am and here's my name, I want to see my name in The Beat", those pieces I'll take back and say, "what did you say, who is going to read this, what are you teaching, what is anyone going to get out of this?" And they will sheepishly smile and write another one. Or people that strictly want to write about, not just write about, but extol the virtues of their street life, which is to say, "I'm posted on the block till I die, my gang is...blue is better than red, Norteno is better than Sureno, I'll kill you when I see you", and they'll make a nice flow out of it, but it has nothing but threat, and it sort of elevates the gang life as if it is the goal of itself. We won't put that in. Now they can write about their gang life, they can write about guns, drugs, colors, any of that stuff, as long as it gets under the surface, isn't just slogans and clichés and teaches something, so that someone learns something. And then hating pieces that are either hating in general, such as, "all them bitches need to get off the street...all them ho's need to...", that we won't put in. Or the word "nigger" we won't put in ever. Unless, I won't say never, we have actually made exceptions to that rule if it has a contextual purposes. If someone is writing about how words can hurt and they use the word "nigger" or "bitch", or whatever, all those hurtful words, yes, we will leave that in because they are making a point about those words. But just in general, no...we don't let those words in. "Bitch", we don't let in, those kinds of words...in general that would be our standard, and of course we also look for plagiarism. Access to the internet has lead a lot of young people to think they can get a lot of these poems and other stories in under their names, but generally they are pretty easy to spot.
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