Last week, I returned to my usual job at the Bangor Daily News after a year-long fellowship with The New York Times examining our state’s juvenile justice system at a pivotal moment. The biggest luxury of the fellowship was time: time to interview dozens and dozens of parents, police, lawyers, teachers, social workers, nurses, corrections officers and, of course, teenagers, about their experience with the state’s corrections system for youth.
Initially, I worried that getting kids to talk to me would be my biggest challenge. I was wrong. The first time I interviewed a pair of 16-year-old best friends about their run-ins with the police, I barely got a word in. They moved at such a high conversational velocity, twisting weird rationales for their actions, circling deeper feelings of sadness and regret, excited that people might be interested in what they had to say.
— Callie Ferguson
