A 17-year-old youth removed a pair of audio headphones and smiled as he stepped out of a San Francisco sound booth on a Wednesday afternoon. He had just recorded his first hip-hop song.
“Man, it’s warm in there!” he declared, fanning his dark-green T-shirt.
He likened the experience to a much-needed mental escape from his current circumstances.
“This is real helpful. It feels good. It kind of feels like I’m not really in jail,” the teen reflected. “I am, though.”
The teen has been an inmate at the Juvenile Justice Center since late February — his fourth time at the center.
The song he created is one example of an activity offered since December through a newly formed partnership between the Juvenile Probation Department and San Francisco-based nonprofit Sunset Youth Services.
The organization, which operates the youth-run music label UpStar Studios, has placed recording equipment in an empty unit at the juvenile center since December. Staff from the nonprofit visit the jail three times a week to record songs created by inmates.
[For more of this story, written by Laura Dudnick, go to http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanf.../Content?oid=2924288]
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