In the hours after 17-year-old David was locked in housing unit H, voices filtered into his cell.

The sound came from multiple places at once: the seams of the door, the vent by the ceiling, the walls themselves. They knew he’d just arrived, and now they wanted to know who he was. Why was he there?

The children in the surrounding cells were trying to speak to him, he realized. Just as they were curious about him, he had a question for them. Where was he?

“You’re not going to be coming out any time soon,” he remembers them saying. “You should just try to lay down.” He was in a place they called “the hole” — a solitary confinement unit.

David was incarcerated in Shelby County’s juvenile detention center, the Youth Justice and Education Center, in 2024. He was kept there for eight months.

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