Professor Receives $600,000 Mellon Foundation Grant to Expand Nonprofit Providing Job Skills, Hope to Young People in Detention Centers

When Randall Horton, Ph.D. thinks about those who helped him to become the professor, award-winning poet, National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and executive director of a groundbreaking creative arts program for young people that recently received a $600,000 Mellon Foundation grant, he thinks of a woman named Pat.

Dr. Horton was about to begin a prison sentence for drug smuggling and trafficking. Pat ran a class at the Montgomery County Detention Center where he was held before serving his time at the Roxbury Correctional Institution in Maryland. At the end of each class, Pat would pose a question and encourage her students to write about it. He shared what he wrote with her. When he was moving to Roxbury, “she asked me to make her one promise: that I would never stop writing,” he said.

“I took that literally,” said Dr. Horton, a professor of English. “I wrote every single morning in my cell and later in the day I would edit what I wrote.” And, he said, it saved him.

When Dr. Horton later pursued an MFA at Chicago State University, his parents – two schoolteachers – took out a $5,000 loan to help fund his studies. He had no scholarship, but when he was short on rent, a friend or others he barely knew would pass him an envelope to help him out. “These were people who never wanted a thing from me,” Dr. Horton said. “They’d just say ‘maybe you can do that for someone else someday.’”

After earning his Ph.D. at SUNY Albany in 2009, he applied for a non-tenured track position at the University of New Haven. He had an initial interview and, when he was offered the job, he told those interviewing him that he needed to come back and talk with them.

“There was no blueprint for what I was about to say – that I had seven felony convictions,” he said. “I poured my story out, and they listened and said, 'okay.' And they hired me. They took a chance on me.”

He quickly realized that he wanted to provide others, particularly young people in the carceral system, with a creative outlet – a new kind of chance.

While he was inside, he spent a lot of time thinking about the prison system, about the young black and brown people in detention centers, about inequities, about what led them there and “how artistic expression can play a role in social justice.”

Today, Radical Reversal, founded by Dr. Horton and composer and producer Devin B. Waldman, has launched programs in Jefferson County’s G. Ross Bell Youth Detention Center in Birmingham, AL – Dr. Horton’s hometown – in the Suffolk County House of Correction in Boston, MA, the Minnesota-Faribault Department of Correction in Faribault, MN, and Oak Creek Youth Correctional Facility in Albany, OR. He plans to establish a studio in a Danbury, CT, correction facility in the near future.

“It became very clear that we needed to help the young people when they get on the outside,” Dr. Horton said. “They needed job opportunities. They needed comprehensive care, mental health care. Some of these kids don’t even know where their family is. These kids have been through some of the most heartbreaking, troubling things I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot in my life.”

When they write poems and songs, their words “sometimes leave me speechless,” Dr. Horton said.

The Mellon Foundation’s $600,000 grant means that “we’ll have a program on the inside and the outside” in the Ensley neighborhood in Birmingham.

Working in collaboration with the city of Birmingham, with organizations including The Flourish Alabama and Brothers Let’s Talk, they are building a creative arts studio in the city filled with state-of-the-art equipment and instruments.

Ten Radical Reversal Fellows will receive a stipend and train to become certified in the Pro Tools music software and will also receive yearlong instruction in graphic design, music production, video production, podcasting, and creative writing. They will be mentored and can receive college credit for course work. Other young people in the community will take part in arts workshops taught by paid visiting artists.

“Radical Reversal seeks to prevent young adults from relapsing into the system while providing concrete skills that can be used in the workforce and wider contexts while bridging marginalized students into higher education and artistic opportunities,” Dr. Horton explained.

The Mellon grant also means that Radical Reversal now has a chief financial officer and program personnel so that Dr. Horton can step back from wearing so many hats.

Monique Grier, director of the G. Ross Bell Youth Detention Center, said Radical Reversal has helped reduce recidivism and inspired hope. “The program has been phenomenal and, dare I say, it was a godsend,” she said. “At a time during Covid when everything was in flux, there wasn’t a lot you could count on, but I could count on Randall Horton and Radical Reversal.”

“Randall saved kids from boredom, from a state of depression,” she said. “They couldn’t go home or visit their families and, on top of that, they were detained. He started them reading poetry, learning how to write prose, to break down works of art and literature. He brought in musical instruments and equipment, and they loved the beat-making machine. We saw children flourish like rosebuds: opening and blooming.

“Inside the detention center we typically keep youth separated,” Grier continued. “In our area, we have a lot of gang violence. But the kids themselves established that the music room was a zone of neutrality. We’ve never had any incidents in that area. I can mix boys and girls, youth from any unit together. They almost forget where they are.”

Rap artist Taleb Kweli; Masego, an instrumentalist who works with Drake; music producers; poet laureates; and Pulitzer Prize winners have taken part in workshops in person and on Zoom in the various detention center studios, Dr. Horton said.

Lorena Corvera '24 M.A., who works for the University’s registrar’s office, interned with Radical Reversal while she was pursuing her master’s in community psychology, working with the program’s budget and its podcast "Sound Off!!!"

“Dr. Horton and his team genuinely believe in the power of the arts as a healing tool,” Corvera said. “The idea of offering poetry and music as a form of rehabilitation for those on the inside to express themselves is so simple but incredibly effective. It's something that will stay with them forever. Once you start creating, you simply don't stop. Listen to the podcast series. All it took was for someone to provide the tools to start the flame.”

Dr. Horton hopes to further develop the intern program with University of New Haven students archiving the participants’ creative work.

“All of the kids we work with are not going to become musicians or poets or filmmakers, but they may,” Dr. Horton said. “We want them to understand the power of the arts. We want them to get into something they feel good about and to think about things in a different way – in a creative way.

“Writing led me to a whole different world,” he tells his University students and the young people he works with in the carceral system. “I lost my way. Writing helped me develop empathy, a moral compass, and forgiveness for others and myself. Everything that is positive in my life started with that writing class.”