Inside Portland’s Juvenile Detention Center, a Music Literacy Program Is Giving Youth the Tools To Tell Their Stories

Donald E. Long Juvenile Detention Center (DEL) abuts high concrete walls, dividing Interstate 84 from Portland’s North Tabor neighborhood. It’s shielded from view, tucked into the kind of street configuration that provokes wrong-turns and dead-ends. As with other reformatories, prisons, or jails, from the outside, the facility looks nondescript, with only a hefty amount of barbed wire coiled above its own tall walls to distinguish it from any other building.

Those held at the center—pre-adjudicated youth—are awaiting hearings or trials. Some are waiting on probation decisions, others to learn whether they’ll face charges as juveniles or adults. Each person’s circumstances are different, but they’re all young, they’ve been charged with a crime serious enough that they’ve been detained, and they’re waiting.

For the past few years, that wait has been scored by a vibrant music literacy program, turning heads, ears, and bending the future toward greater promise for a number of youth on the inside.

Jody Redifer says the name Books to Beats wasn’t his idea. The program’s title arrived years into his work with youth at the center and a curriculum he co-created with DEL teacher David Shine.

“Dave is the kind of teacher that I wish I’d had when I was younger,” says Redifer. “He breaks apart the songs and gets his students talking about how songs affect culture, how people perceive songs.”

A prolific local drummer, Redifer has been a part of a Portland’s music scene for decades, active in a variety of genres. He currently plays with electro-pop group Makintosh and can be seen at a kit in Mic Crenshaw’s new video for “Retribution,” but he also fondly remembers ’90s hip-hop nights at Satyricon.

Redifer’s experience in recording arts led him to add discussions about music- and video-making to the classes. He began brainstorming a way to bring in recording equipment, as an arm of the library’s services. Pandemic shutdown had shuttered the county’s public libraries, but DEL’s remained open. This created an unusual situation of extra funds, which could be put towards purchasing gear. He brought in microphones, monitors, headphones, a recording interface, some software, and a Macbook Pro. The modest buy-in helped to establish what would become Books to Beats.

“The kids were super into it,” says Redifer. “It was a trip for me to see how into it they were.”

He estimates that the majority of students were interested in making rap tracks, saying: “There’s a lot of affiliated youth in there, youth that come from backgrounds where they’re like, ‘my uncle was a Crip and my dad was a Crip, all my cousins are Crips.” Like the word affiliated implies, gang relationships can surround youths, even if they are not active with the organization themselves. “So they’d start off rapping about that. Over time, I got to watch youth really grow and evolve in their thinking and their ability to express their emotions.”

In 2021, David Shine started at DEL as an English and social studies teacher with Multnomah Education Services District (MESD). He approached Redifer about working with students on a songwriting contest put on by a national program called BreakFree Education. The students dug into the contest, and Shine and Redifer both doubled-down on their commitment.

“Our kids wrote a lot about poverty or being in the system,” says Shine. “We didn’t win the contest, but we had a lot of buy-in. The results were amazing; the songs were great. We got a new sense of community. These guys felt great that they could tell their stories in a way that they couldn’t tell their stories before. They were venting.”

[While they didn’t win the first year, DEL students won several placements in 2023. Shine and Redifer shared some of the tracks with us, so we could embed them throughout the rest of the piece. -eds]

BreakFree hasn’t held a songwriting contest in a couple years, but Redifer says he and Shine continued the contest on their own, just at DEL.

Shine tied the students’ schoolwork to music, using writing and recording hip-hop songs to approach literacy and communications skills. It became a way for the youth to talk about their past, their upbringing, and their feelings about justice with more refined language.

“That gives an outlet to kids that we didn’t see before,” says Shine. “When we started doing that, kids were taking school a lot more seriously. We started saying, ‘If you wanna do music, you have to do this much school, you have to meet these requirements.’”

An 18-year-old in the program, who we’ll call DB, took on a mentorship role in Books to Beats, encouraging them to write beyond memories of the life choices and affiliations that perhaps led them to DEL, and instead to articulate their current plights and new aspirations.

“A lot of this stuff is what you read, what you put into your mind, the music you listen to,” says DB. “It plays a big part in how you wanna broadcast your voice, from your perspective and your story.”

At the time of our conversation, DB was working with JF, a 19-year-old resident of DEL who’d been there for over two years. They knew each other prior to entering the center, and Books to Beats had allowed them to work collaboratively on a recording that DB hoped to have completed by his birthday.

“[JF] is the reason I started rapping,” says DB. “He basically taught me how to rap.”

DB had been at DEL since 2023, but was released for trial over the summer. He credits Redifer and Shine for much of his progress, saying: “I’m not gonna lie, if it wasn’t for Jody and Dave, I probably wouldn’t have made it this far. A lot of us are fighting for our lives here, with these serious charges and being here for as long as we’re here with the little resources we do have.”

MESD is a guest in the DEL detention space, providing education onsite. The space itself belongs to the Department of Criminal Justice’s Juvenile Services Division. As DEL school program administrator Bich Do explains, it’s a dizzying web of collaborations, but she’s seen accredited high school graduation rates increase since she started in October 2024.

“We have so many kids graduating,” said Do. “Every month, someone’s ready to graduate, and it’s been really cool in the sense that what we’re doing to support kids is obviously working. But this is a pre-adjudicated space; kids shouldn’t be here long enough to graduate, so it’s kind of that double-edged sword.”

Education is part of DEL’s programming, and even if they have a GED, youth there still take MESD’s high school classes. Do explains that most come in credit deficient, so the center’s classes are every day, yearlong, year-round. Shine and Do both say that the sense of normalcy the Books to Beats program provides—and the exposure to outside popular culture and media—has been a boon for the rate of graduations, as well as for the general tone of DEL’s day-to-day.

“I think people from the outside looking in will see this as a product,” says Do, “like the kids have made this. But as an administrator, I see it as a process. A lot of it is about revising and editing yourself. Really being intentional and self-monitoring and reflective of what you write, how you write it, how you present your ideas, organizing it. It’s more than just these are kids writing poetry and recording; they’re learning really core skills in a very sneaky way.”

“Teaching in general is a thankless job,” says Shine, “and being in a detention setting, it’s even more thankless. We know what we’re capable of and the impact we have. But outside of this building, most people don’t know what we do.”

Taking on another title as program specialist in MCL’s Creative Learning audio and video program, Redifer has been leading the library system’s recording studio set-ups, which are part of the ongoing flurry of library remodels. He says he still spends a few hours at DEL every week, and has encouraged youths he’s worked with to relink with him at the new audio-visual spaces to continue making art.

“I just wanna come together with Jody when I come out of here, so I can figure out how to get these kids off the streets and start rapping,” says JF. “That shit is kinda inspiring, because I wish I had a studio to go to to take up my time—instead of being where I didn’t need to be at the time. I know Jody does it for the kids; he doesn’t necessarily do it for money or anything. He’s here to help. I’m just gonna take those connections and move forward and try to do something that’s great for the kids.”