The Genesis of A Deeper Groove
Compelled to serve troubled teens by a personal experience, I joined the Somerset County (NJ) Juvenile Conference Committee in 2006. The concept-small groups of minimally trained adult volunteers counseling teens whose minor offenses would otherwise send them through the court system-dates back to the early 1950s.
The idea was sound, but during my two years on the JCC I grew frustrated by the limited time allotted to each offender and the absence of a thoughtful follow-up process. I wanted to do more. After pressing the New Jersey Department of Corrections in Trenton and meeting with a panel of social-services representatives at Northern State Prison in Newark, I was invited to participate in a program called Focus on the Victim.
Powerful interactions take place when inmates-selected by staff who believe they have developed the empathy needed to benefit from the program-hear directly from ordinary citizens who have been victims of crime. A woman speaks about her sister, murdered on the streets of Newark by a former boyfriend. An elderly couple describes the death of their only child, killed by a drunk driver. A woman from the Bronx, raised in poverty and with limited schooling, recounts the night she tried to protect her three young children from a burglar, the moment sulphuric acid was thrown in her face, and how, newly blind, she was abandoned by her husband. She later earned a law degree and became a college professor and victims’ rights advocate.
I served as an FOV counselor in three penal institutions: Mountainview Youth Correctional Facility, Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, and Northern State Prison. During my second stint at Northern State, an official pulled me aside and suggested that I consider working in a halfway house. He connected me with Henry Iwualu, an administrator at The Kintock Group in Newark, and we met a few weeks later.
Henry asked a simple question: what kind of program would I like to run? I immediately thought of music-my passion, the art that occupies me without pause, morning to midnight. I remembered the year I devoted to developing Beyond the Labels: An Examination of Racism in the Music Industry, a project conceived as an antidote to the bile of Khalid Abdul Muhammad, who in 1993 appeared at nearby Kean College and referred to the Pope as a “no-good cracker” while praising Hitler. The panel I convened-featuring prominent artists from rap and popular music-took the same stage, and the evening proved powerful.
Though it involves listening to and discussing records, A Deeper Groove, the course I developed, is ultimately not about music. It’s about helping inmates build practical skills that increase their chances of finding meaningful employment after release.
Many of the men I work with come from poor, inner-city neighborhoods. Few believe they will be accepted beyond the borders of the communities in which they were raised. That insecurity hardens into a protective shell. I ask my students to imagine a scenario: they walk into the office of a property manager seeking a superintendent. The job pays $35,000 a year, includes medical benefits, and comes with a free apartment. On the wall hangs a poster for La Bohème at the Metropolitan Opera, or a James Taylor concert. Wouldn’t it surprise the manager if you mentioned that you knew Taylor’s work, or thought Boheme was a great work of art?
Over the next three months, we listen to music-some of it mine, some of it theirs. A twenty-one-year-old inmate giggles when I recite the lyrics to N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police.” I challenge his assumption that musical styles belong to only one culture. We talk about Beethoven’s brutal childhood, how Fat Joe’s father abandoned his family, about racism and ageism. We listen to Felix Mendelssohn, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Tupac Shakur, works that span centuries and cultures.
Maybe - if I’m lucky - one of them will complete his sentence believing there is a place for him in the wider world.
