The resulting documentary, Real Time, which opened at the Cinequest film festival on March 1, may not provide a cut-and-dried explanation for youth violence, but the glimpse it provides into the minds and lives of young felons is one that Miller hopes will spark public interest in at-risk youth.

Chairman of the digital motion picture department at Cogswell Polytechnical College in Sunnyvale, Miller recruited five students to accompany him to the O.H. Close Youth Detention Center near Stockton for bimonthly visits between September 1999 and March 2000. The mission: to teach 10 young wards how to make movies—and to document their personal stories in the process.

The O.H. Close facility, part of the California Youth Authority, is no ordinary youth detention center, offering classes, recreational opportunities and extracurricular activities similar to that of any American high school. The ever-present barbed wire fence in Real Time serves as a constant reminder, however, that O.H. Close is in fact a prison.

"We all went in a little nervous because [the center's officials] tried to scare us beforehand," says Miller. "They had us read this book that was titled something like, 'How Not to Get Conned by the Prisoners.' But after the first couple of weeks, the kids began to trust us, and we began to trust them."

"I was a little skeptical at first about how open I could be, given my background," says James Bennett, one of the wards featured in the film. "But then as we started making the film, I felt good that these people were interested in the life that I lived. They accepted me for what I was at a time when I didn't think society would accept me."

Knowing that many of the inmates they were working with were in for violent crimes, the film crew chose to wait until the end of the project to interview their subjects about their past, in the interest of maintaining objectivity. As the wards describe their crimes for the camera, they mention the pain they have caused their victims, their own regret, what they've learned about themselves through the extensive "sensitization" therapy O.H. Close inmates are required to undergo.

"Jail is a time for you to think about your life and decide whether you want to make changes or not," says parolee Mark Devic in the film. "You can give a person all the groups and the counseling and the therapy in the world. ... Maybe one in a hundred people actually apply it to their life. The rest—it goes in one ear and out the other. The people that become successful out of jail just want to change. Period."

Sixty percent of O.H. Close inmates don't return to prison once they're released, a statistic that supports the argument that rehabilitation through education and the arts is effective—at least in many cases.

"Most of these kids [at O.H. Close] come from single-parent homes where the parent was working 14 hours a day," says Miller. "They had no supervision. They really had no place to go except to hang out with their friends who were getting into all kinds of trouble. So on camera we asked them, 'What would've helped?' And they said what would've helped is being offered opportunities like after-school programs, creative programs" such as what they experienced in prison.

What Miller hopes is that Real Time will serve as a springboard for discussion about at-risk youth—and a catalyst for change.

"You can go to all the underprivileged, underrepresented kids who are getting involved with gangs, who don't see that there's a future for them beyond the quick buck. You can show these kids, 'You don't just have to try to be sports stars and rap artists. There's more—you can be that.' "

'Real Time' shows Friday, March 7 at 4 p.m. at the Camera 3 theater, Second and San Carlos streets, San Jose. A free discussion with Lee Miller and several youth outreach groups will be held at the Pruneyard Barnes & Noble bookstore in Campbell on March 6 at 7 p.m. For more information, visit www.cinequest.org.