Two 17-Year-Olds in Custody Wrote a Love Song in an Arts Program. One Didn’t Survive.
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The poet and University of New Haven English professor Randall Horton self-identifies as “the only person in the United States with seven felony convictions and academic tenure as a full professor.” Having spent time in Maryland prisons on theft charges in the 1990s, he now embodies freedom as a restless experimenter, from his avant-garde jazz ensemble to his essay imagining a conversation with a Ralph Ellison memorial sculpture.
A few years ago, he started Radical Reversal, which builds recording studios in youth and adult lockups, where teenagers create music, poetry and podcasts in multi-week workshops. They operate in four states and have brought in guest artists including poet Patricia Smith and rapper Lupe Fiasco.
Horton told me it can take a long time to convince kids in such facilities to follow his own path out of hopelessness. He once asked a room of kids to write about something beautiful in their lives. A girl responded by asking him, “What if you don’t know no beautiful?”
Last year at Jefferson County Youth Detention Center, in Birmingham, Alabama, he met 17-year-old friends Jacob Crumel (who records as Li Fatt) and Imahd Gee (known as BabyModd). They told Horton they would carry around illegal guns because they feared for their lives, often leading to shootouts.
But Horton recalled, “They were hungry and had this curiosity, asking me, ‘Hey what’s college like?’ I remember looking in Imahd’s eyes and seeing him quietly thinking about all the possibilities of who he could be.”
Horton started negotiating with corrections officers to get the duo extra studio time, and his Radical Reversal co-founder Devin Waldman stayed up late mixing their tracks. They tended to rap about life on the streets, but Horton challenged them to try out a love song.
On “Righteous Love Song,” Crumel drew on his own recent troubles with a girlfriend. In a singsong style, he raps, “I can’t give you my heart ‘cause if I do then you might break it / I know that you’ve been hurt before, so I’m just being patient.”
Then Gee jumps in with a flurry of trap-style triplets: “I’m the one that be searching for love. I don’t know where to go, so I guess I’m a thug.”
Crumel and Gee were released at the beginning of 2026. “We were waiting for them to come out because we knew they were special and wanted to get them opportunities,” said Horton. He tried to steer them both to college and helped Crumel get on a plane for the first time in his life to read poetry at an event in Manhattan. “It was an experience I never thought I was gonna get, to be honest,” Crumel said.
Then four months ago, Horton told me, his phone rang in the middle of the night. Crumel was crying. Gee had been shot and killed. He was 18. “It was some altercation at a gas station that surely could have been avoided,” Horton said.
As they all grieved, the music itself became a memorial to Gee. “I would say it’s heartbreaking, but also… it makes me feel good knowing I got to do that with him before he passed away,” Crumel told me.
I was talking to Crumel over Zoom, along with Horton and another 18-year-old from the program, Tyrese Carson, who goes by Scrap. Crumel admitted he’d mostly stopped listening to the songs he recorded with Gee, although he wasn’t sure why.
Then Carson piped up: “Man, I love those songs, I probably listen to them every day!”
His smile was infectious; Crumel caught it and said, “It’s good music, I ain’t gonna lie.”
Liner Notes
Song: “Righteous Love Song” | Artists: Li Fatt (Jacob Crumel) and BabyModd (Imahd Gee) | Producer: Travis Scott | Executive Director: Randall Horton | Artistic Director and Mixing by: Devin B. Waldman | Chief Operating Officer: Leola Dublin Macmillan
