- The food I miss the most from the outside
is my mom's cooking, for sure .
My mom's birria, my mom's mole,
my mom's tamales, everything is just like, oh my gosh.
Authentic Mexican food is just extremely delicious.
If you haven't tasted it, I don't know where you've been at.
You've probably been in jail .
- [Narrator] This is my friend Daniel.
I met him through Gateways for Incarcerated Youth,
a college class that allows students
and incarcerated youth to learn alongside each other
at Green Hill School, a juvenile
detention facility in Chehalis, Washington.
Daniel was one of my first friends in the class
and we bonded over our mutual love for 90s R&B.
He got locked up just before his 16th birthday
and he was sentenced to 20 years.
- My name is Daniel Perez.
I'm from Yakima and I'm 20 years old.
I first got booked when I was 15 years old.
Like everything was just kind of like tunnel vision,
me and my gang and that's it, and everything else
was like nothing else mattered, everything else was less.
I went to the juvenile in Yakima.
I was fresh off the streets, and then I
transitioned into the county jail
where I was placed with adults.
I wasn't allowed to like sit amongst them or anything.
I had to program alone because I was younger.
You come out every 32 hours for two hours.
You only get two visits a week that
are 30 minutes through a small video screen.
You know, having parents that can't even
speak English so they can't even call to set up the visit.
I think anyone could just imagine being 15
and it's like, I guess that'd be ninth grade.
I was sitting in a jail cell and my lawyer's
telling me that I'm facing like 30 odd years.
The guy next door to you is about 30, 40 years old
and he's looking at three life sentences,
like damn, what am I crying about?
They're sitting there talking about
how they're trying to get into these college courses.
This guy is gonna accomplish all these things
and he has like three life sentences,
but he's still doing it, he's still
striving for the education, that knowledge.
A lot of people see you being incarcerated
as you becoming more of a criminal,
indulging yourself more deeply in that gang lifestyle,
and it's like, you could form your incarceration instead.
Rehabilitation is a very important part
to the jail system, but not the way they do it,
you know, right now, with a whole bunch of just
psychologists just sitting in a office
reading books about how teenage minds work.
Put those statistics away, put those PhD books away,
sit down and talk to somebody that's locked up
that's a teenager that lived the rough life,
you know what I mean?
Interesting how these people go through so much schooling
and whatnot to at the end of the day
not have realized that in order
to know somebody you have to talk to them.
- [Narrator] Daniel is forming his incarceration
by partaking in Green Hills' Latino Culture Group,
reading on his own time, and taking
the Gateways college class.
- A couple of my friends were here
and they were just telling me about
how they were in college class and
how it's pretty cool that they get to interact
with people from the outs, and it's like
when you just sit down with people your own age
and like talk about normal stuff, you know,
like the coolest rapper out there,
or like the new stupidest video
that they be playing, or whatever, you know?
Honestly, I remember first meeting Mya,
I think it was like last year, and then we're
sitting there and another guy asked her, like,
when you come here do you think like damn,
I'm gonna go to a jail and kick it with criminals?
And she's like, no.
And I was like oh, okay.
Almost everybody that I've met from Evergreen,
like they see us as people and it's like yeah, that's cool.
That's great.
Gangs target children because they know
that those minds are easily manipulated,
and once that mind is molded to the gang lifestyle
then there ain't no changing it back.
If you're from my rival gang you're not
gonna talk to me, regardless if I'm trying
to help our people or not, so I gotta
go to those children before they
choose up, before they get there.
I gotta make sure that they do choose the right path.
There's a lot more to the world
than just a couple streets in my town, you know?
I want to be there for people that
see knowledge as kind of a waste of time,
as something boring.
Incarceration doesn't form you,
you form your incarceration, instead of doing
what everybody expects you to do with your incarceration.