About the guest blogger: Katy McCarthy is the blog and media director at www.juvenile-in-justice.com. In 2011, she received her Bachelors degree from University of California, Santa Barbara in studio art. When not in her own studio, she is editing and blogging for Juvenile In Justice. Katy can be reached at blogdirector@juvenile-in-justice.com

A youth prison in Maryland where many of the cells, referred to as rooms, have chalk board walls free to be drawn on. A California Youth Authority facility where young people serving “juvie life” sentences tack complex photo collages to the walls above their beds and desks. A cell at a detention facility in Multnomah County, Oregon where an 18” painted square on one wall delineates where young inmates can hang photos—all of the other wall space must remain blank. These are all examples of spaces in youth confinement facilities where children are permitted some creative control. My organization, Juvenile In Justice, having documented more than 200 facilities in 31 states in the U.S, can state with some confidence that the range of visuals/art in the youth prison system is overall pretty bleak.

Art can play a significant role in the process of healing. In the world of health design (Doctor’s offices, hospitals, etc.) there has been a huge movement towards “evidence-based art”– art and design  initiatives with observable health outcomes including shortened hospital stays, decrease in pain medication,  and lowered blood pressure and heart rate. Other important outcomes include patient ratings of perceived pain, satisfaction with services, and economic outcomes. Studies in the last decade have found some amazing correlations between art programs/visuals and reduced anxiety, stress, fatigue, increased pain tolerance and more positive outcomes in surgical procedures. Nature images tend to illicit the most positive responses.

Keeping the insides of youth prisons blank slates is a punitive tactic that falls more into the “scared straight” category. It reads: “You are bad. You do not have the privilege of looking at anything other than monotone walls. You are here to be punished.” This mentality, manifested as sterile walls and anonymous cells, doesn’t jive with me or arts programs research. Studies by the National Arts Education Research Center show that integrating the creative arts into all learning experiences enhances academic, social, and personal developmental outcomes (Ross, 1991). Just last year the Alaska State Council on the Arts, using money from the Percent for Art initiative, put out a call for entries for artists to create interior artwork for the McLaughlin Youth Center (MYC) in Anchorage, Alaska. The stated goals for the project requested art that would calm youth, imply building positive relationships, stability and consistency, and be relevant to teenage boys from diverse backgrounds. It is refreshing to see an institution understanding that art can accomplish these goals. That it serves multiple purposes and will change the environment from one of punishing to one of rehabilitation and concern for well being.

In his intro to Juvenile In Justice, the book we published in August of last year, Ira Glass writes:

“And what do you call the look– the visual aesthetics–  of the jails and prisons we put [kids] in? Going into these places reporting various stories, I’ve learned that usually they are not squalid places. It’s the sterility of these places– the bare, freshly painted concrete walls, the unadorned floor– that makes the truth of what they’re for so obvious and make them so impersonal. These are cages.”

Of course we all want the majority of youth detention centers and prisons shut down. We want more kids diverted to community programs. We want more kids kept out of the system entirely. We want youth prisons to be reserved for the fraction of the youth offender population that poses a public safety risk. But until then, the estimated 60,000 kids falling asleep in cells deserve better than what they have. They deserve art. Art should not be a privilege, it should be considered a fundamental rehabilitative practice.

Below are some photographs taken by Richard Ross as a part of Juvenile In Justice that demonstrate a range of the “visual aesthetics” incorporated and permitted in youth facilities across the country. Sometimes the efforts made to include art are sort of sorry looking. But I can appreciate that start, and encourage more facilities and states to make like Alaska and truly invest in an art and design program that uses evidence-based principles.

The state of visual aesthetics in juvenile justice facilities today:

All images by Richard Ross for Juvenile-in-Justice

Blending shades of cynicism and hopeful feeling, these poets and storytellers will show you a side of justice you’ve never seen.  Alongside these short pieces are stunning (and often unsettling) photographs that capture in images what the writer captures in words.  These works will change your mind about the criminal justice system and what it means to be a criminal; ultimately, they will change your heart.

People are trapped by prison walls.  Prisoners and others are constrained by personal limitations they build for themselves.  The goal of the BleakHouse Review is not to make excuses for terrible crimes, but rather to shed a humane light on the very human men, women, and children who feel the brutality of a broken system every day.  In this magazine, you will also read “Momma” by Allison Kroboth, a prisoner at Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women.  She adopts the perspective of a child, drawn from her own childhood, remembering in touching clarity the startling arrest of her mother, a caring woman with bad habits.

For many contributing students, this is their first time as published writers.  BleakHouse Publishing wants to uplift aspiring artists, propelling them in many instances to their first successes and urging them to use their creative gifts to generate awareness for social justice issues.

BleakHouse Review is edited by Dr. Robert Johnson, a Professor at American University, (literary content) and Carla Mavaddat (art and design). For the 2013 issue, we gratefully acknowledge the assistance and support provided by associate editor Jada Wittow.

A copy of the BleakHouse Review is available online for free on our website for a limited time.

Recidivism

From the Latin: recidīvus “recurring” and recidō “I fall back” and re “back” and cadō “I fall.” 

– Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Before working in a prison, I had never heard the term. A guard, Albert Overcash, took me out on escape with him – a violation that would’ve meant his job. Albert knew the guy on the run – Clarence Vessel (alias Weasel) – and didn’t think it mattered one way or another if Clarence were caught or stayed gone. “I’m sure not hauling him back to the camp,” Albert vowed.

Clarence, a revolving-door drunk, had never hurt anybody. They’d pick him up, drunker than ten men, for loitering or pissing against a dumpster, stealing potted meat at Kroger. Give him eighteen months. He’d serve six active, bump out, then back in for Mogen David, Wild Irish Rose, MD 20-20. DTs, black-outs, his gray matter eaten up with rotgut.

Albert laid this all out to me. Before I knew anything. Before I had a notion of time and captivity. He didn’t want to be a prison guard; but, my age, he had a wife and new baby girl. In high school, he had had a tryout with the Cubs, then got his girl pregnant and dropped out before graduation to work, copped a GED, and finally picked up the job at Huntersville Prison: simple enough if you could navigate the application and clear the PIN check. A shitty job with shitty wages, but stability and benefits. He was chipping away on a degree in Criminal Justice at Central Piedmont. He smoked reefer and drank malt liquor. Thin hair fell over his ears; he wore gold bracelets and necklaces with his uniform. The old guards didn’t like him. He thought every last bit of it was a farce.

We just rode around the day Clarence Vessel ran, relieved we didn’t run up on him. As dictated by procedure, Albert communicated over the CB to the other vehicles involved in the chase: 10-4 and What’s your 20? On his chest, he wore the silver Department of Correction nameplate: M.A (for Maynard Albert) Overcash. We crossed into Cabarrus County, stopped at a roadhouse for beer and corndogs, listened to Led Zeppelin, threw darts and drove back to the Unit.

I don’t know if Clarence was ever found. 60 to 70 percent of the men and women sent up go back to prison at least once during their lives – not even taking into account the ones who never get out. Those numbers seemed so absurdly impossible that I dismissed them – Albert’s kind of joke, a stab at irony. He worked third shift, all night – the dead man’s shift – when the prison unleashed its haints and diabolical. He’d hole up in the sergeant’s office, between the two wings of the cellblock, packed each with ninety convicts, bunked three-tiers high, some very dangerous men, and read Stephen King. Albert and I went to the Capri on opening night and watched The Shining. He insisted we sit in the first row. Those bloody, desiccated monsters hurtling through the screen into our faces. We were both twenty-three. He knew I was trying to be a writer. He had a drawer full of stories he promised to show me.

But for all that, he invested in the wrong person, forgot the first principle of his profession: Never trust a convict. Contraband (another term): a buzz, some tiny shimmer to elevate Albert above the yard into the book he was dying to write – maybe about a young white prison guard with a new family who gets roiled up with a black convict cook, perhaps the two are secretly in love, and sells his soul for a weedy lid of dirt-clotted home-grown.

Albert got popped. Ended up trailing time himself at a minimum camp in Anson County: 6 months active – like Clarence Vessel. Often that’s how it starts: a fellow catches piddling time behind an innocent high, wrong place, wrong time (same way Albert explained Clarence). Could happen to anybody: one lousy misfire and you find yourself a convict, sporting prison greens, in constant peril. Perhaps that life even becomes you.

After that first jolt, Albert flopped back and forth to the penitentiary, mainly possession and public drunks, dibbing and dabbing, and finally he ran. He’s out there somewhere, right now, his name on a fugitive warrant.

Freedom Drive

At Camp Greene, I picked up two inmates rigged out in street clothes for work-release interviews at Jack’s Steak House on Freedom Drive. A petite convict named Short Dog,

all mouth, never stopped, the almighty dozens – what the inmates termed jooging –

a nervous conspiratorial laugh, toothpick, black leather jacket, and black toboggan.

Like a warhead. And a husky woman I had never seen before: Debbie, from the Halfway House on Park Road. Garish make-up, close afro, decked in hot pants, platforms, skimpy red tube cinching her considerable breasts, yet practiced in her dainty airs.

She and Short Dog lounged in the back seat of the state car: a blue ‘74 Valiant that bore the North Carolina Department of Correction decal on its front doors: a downward arrow that suddenly U-turned Heavenward, symbolic of the restoration engendered by a stretch in prison – the DOC at its most allegorical. The car had a bright yellow commonwealth tag and a CB that was to remain engaged whenever the vehicle was in operation. Along the drive shaft was a bracket to rack and lock a shotgun. I had switched off the CB. We listened to the radio. Autumn of ’76, Dylan’s Desire: “Hurricane” and “Joey.” The inmates liked those songs – the blood and danger.

We plopped in a booth at Jack’s. Debbie, red lipsticked mouth, batting eyes, blush caked on her high brown cheeks, propped her big breasts on the Formica – a carnal chaingang icon – Short Dog grinning gaudily, balancing the shaker in a drift of salt, worrying that toothpick around his mouth like a compass needle. The manager asked them a few questions, and hired them on the spot. Inmate labor was cheap and dependable.

On the way back to the camp, they smoked cigarettes, and held hands. We dropped by the Dairy Queen and together slowly ate the white pristine cones. Short Dog, later on the yard, finally clued me that Debbie was no girl, but Dwight, a transsexual, not the same as a he-she, but an inmate who had crossed over prior to going down; therefore the State was obliged by law to keep the hormones coming and everything else, including, if and when, the irrevocable surgery.

Debbie – everyone called her the girl – wore Honor Grade fatigues on the yard, but come lock-down shed to teddies and camisoles, a straight-up female – you couldn’t tell the difference – with a vicious body and lingerie living in the penitentiary dorm with 180 men who hadn’t had a woman in years. And she fought like a gladiator.

Convicts arriving on the transfer bus figured they’d caught the best time on the State.

A nightmare for custody, the Department didn’t know how to classify her, what pronoun was appropriate. Technically she was not a woman, so they couldn’t transfer her to Women’s in Raleigh. She was clearly not a man.

I didn’t know a damn thing, and that was never more apparent than that afternoon on Freedom Drive when I could not distinguish a man from a woman. I was just driving the car, digging Dylan, and a 50-cent cone from the DQ. In fact, I had been thinking: Mother of God. But not a desperate or even imploring Mother of God. Rather, a prayer of thanksgiving, near euphoria, that my life was just starting and the world was so utterly strange.