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.

Last night’s class at Kintock, the halfway house in Newark where I teach a music course, was one of those rare sessions that make the effort feel worthwhile. The current group has been hard to break through; in the past two lessons, Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 stirred little more than polite silence.

The course I teach at the Kintock Halfway House in Newark isn’t really about music.  The guys I work with fit the prison profile outsiders would expect to find, for the most part; young men from financially stressed backgrounds form the general population.  Most of them have little academic training and almost no exposure to cultures that exist beyond the mean streets they call home.

I hadn’t planned on blogging this, but when I came home from prison tonight my 21 year old son Brian told me that he saw Jim McGreevey on the Elliot Spitzer show and was very impressed by him. McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey, spoke about politics, his homosexuality, and his life’s work at this time, working in prison.