The Beat Within vs. Mother Jones Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

The Beat Within vs. Mother Jones - Essay Example The Beat Within is a San Francisco literary magazine that started in 1996 and is published by San Francisco’s Pacific News Service. It comes out weekly and includes essays, poems and art done by young people in prison (Sanders 2004). The staff who act as their support group, and who give them workshops, collect writings and artwork from regional areas including halls in Northern California, Arizona, New York, British Columbia and Virginia and publish them. Readership of The Beat Within is primarily composed of the kids who produce them, and each issue would carry a page called â€Å"The Beat Without,† featuring an essay of a former juvenile hall detainee (Martin 2005). The Beat Within started as a four-page newsletter when a mentor named Tupac died and the impact was so great, the children needed something to express their feelings on. The story goes - â€Å"The 1996 death of Tupac Shakur, an iconic rapper and the militant son of a Black Panther, who himself had been in prison, changed everything. His students mourned his death in such a powerful way that Inocencio [co-founder of Beat] felt their work needed to be shared. ‘I had to put it out there,’ he said. ‘It was urgent.’ Just like that, one man's death initiated a lifeline for others. The premiere of the Beat Within was a thin but powerful eulogy for Tupac.†(Sanders 2004). Now, the magazine runs more than a hundred pages to each issue and circulation has expanded to include interest groups especially those on welfare. Autobiographical in nature, the writings and artwork are believed to give the inmates something to start with (Ibid).