The teenagers inside the South Bend Juvenile Correctional Facility are easily judged. After all, they are locked up for one reason or another. But the young men – removed from their hometowns, their families and their schools – might surprise you.

“The department of corrections is a last stop,” said Esa Ehmen-Krause, the superintendent.

“They’ve been through the county facilities, they've been through residential treatment centers, they've done home monitoring and those things haven't worked,” said Ehmen-Krause.

At any given time, there are roughly 90 young men locked up behind the facility’s walls.

On any given Monday, you can find nine of them choosing to spend their free time around a table, where they learn—and write.

"Read anything you wrote this week, if you would like to share something," said Ryan Downey, a Notre Dame graduate student who co-teaches the creative writing class.

Ask the handful of young men at the table why they are there, and the charges vary from burglary to criminal recklessness. One of the 15- and 16-year-olds has a daughter. Another has this to share:

"I've got a lot of pain in my life cause my mom, she's 40, and she has a 19-year-old boyfriend, and they're about to get married and they have a kid."

Put simply, their backgrounds are full of pain.

"They definitely have stories, and history, and a lot of pain," said superintendent Ehmen-Krause.

So the class they choose to attend is a venue to express it.

“Now I just sit here, in remembrance of our days, I can't wait to come home and see you're smiling face,” said one of the young men.

"Someday I'll be the same, and this nightmare will fade into memory," said another, reading from his notebook.

"This minute is short, but the future is long, so try to plan ahead, for if you're determined as well as persistent your plans will never be dead," shared a third.

Sami Schalk is the other Notre Dame grad student who started the once-weekly class.

"I've just been continually impressed by how vulnerable they let themselves be, how honest they are,” she said.

"When I think back to being their age, I would have chosen sports or I would have chosen, play games or watch TV,” said Downey.

Instead, these young men choose to write.

“It's easier for me to put down stuff on paper, than like verbally talk to people about it,” said one of them.

"Creative writing reminds me that I will be free some day," shared another.

Thanks to a grant from the university, the young men in that poetry class will get their work published in an anthology later this year.