At one Indianapolis juvenile detention center, residents are given the chance once a month to participate in a shelter dog training program.

The week-long Pawsitive Corrections program, run by the therapy dog nonprofit Paws & Think, is held at the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center. Each month, five shelter dogs from Indianapolis Animal Care Services are brought to stay at the center for one week, where 10 residents conduct obedience training along with volunteer trainers.

Since 2013, more than 300 dogs and more than 600 incarcerated minors have been impacted by the program.

In order to participate in the program a resident must be on good behavior, said Kimberly Trimpe, Youth-Canine coordinator. Not only does it provide this incentive, but often the kids can empathize with the dogs they are working with.

“A lot of these dogs come from bad situations [and] have had neglect or abuse histories, too,” Trimpe said. “And that helps the kids to empathize, it really helps them understand communication and to be able to read the dog.”

Trimpe has been with Paws & Think since 2011 and said that’s when the Pawsitive Corrections program started becoming more regular after a period of intermittance.

Terrance Asante-Doyle, superintendent of the detention center, said in a 2017 video that the Pawsitive Corrections program not only is important to him but is a “mainstay” at the center.

“I see the impact it has on the youth,” Asante-Doyle said. “You can see the excitement that the youth have in just being able to interact with a canine.”

The first day of the program involves going over training strategies with the participating residents, and an emphasis on using positive reinforcement, Trimpe said. On Tuesday, the dogs arrive and stay until Friday, with the actual training lasting an hour each day.

“It’s amazing what they teach them in four days,” Trimpe said, adding that the hope is to eventually extend the program if circumstances allow.

Though training is only an hour long in the afternoon, volunteers are needed until the evening to spend time with the dogs and make sure their needs are met. Trimpe said they also encourage the detention center staff to allow the residents time with the dogs outside of their training.

Wendy Lane, longtime Pawsitive Corrections volunteer, said she has seen the program make kids more confident in themselves after their participation.

“I think the majority don’t hear what they do right, it’s always what they’ve done wrong,” Lane said. “Doing this program (has showed me) that they’re still kids that have the same wants and dreams as any other kid that’s not in that situation.”

Asante-Doyle said he has seen kids turn their behavior around immediately when they find out they can be part of the program.

“Not only does it help with behavior, but we’re also doing a service to the community as far as being able to help these dogs become more adoptable,” Asante-Doyle said.

A few years ago, Lane walked into her downtown CVS and the security guard stopped her. He recognized her from the program, and told her that he looked forward to it every day when he participated. 

“He said that program got [him] through having to be [in the detention center] … he still remembered his dog’s name,” Lane said. 

This encounter represents exactly what Paws & Think is trying to do with the Pawsitive Corrections program, Lane said, by leaving a positive impact on vulnerable kids.

Lane herself has benefited from the program: her therapy dog, Liza, was a shelter dog that graduated from the training before Lane adopted her in 2014. Today, she brings Liza to the detention center on Saturdays to interact with the kids and said it’s where Liza enjoys therapy sessions the most.

“The kids gave her a second chance, and I feel like she’s just like giving back to the kids,” Lane said. “I like to tell the kids that because the kids do make a difference in these dog’s lives. And hopefully the dogs and this program make a difference with the kids. I think it does, and I think that’s what keeps it going, because we do see changes.”

Source photo courtesy of Paws & Think.

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Sam Roumph was supposed to be suiting up in an orange and black uniform his senior year for the Sterling Tigers, the defending state champions and No. 1 ranked high school basketball team in Colorado’s 3A division.

Instead, he sported maroon and silver for the opposing Ridge View Academy Rams, the lowest-ranked team facing the Tigers in the first round of the playoffs.

Not only did Roumph play on his old home court against his former teammates, but he was playing for “the jail school” team, composed of juvenile offenders.

“You showed up and you were the jailhouse team,” Roumph said. “Everybody knew it.”

Roumph was arrested as a juvenile for an auto accident involving injury, and spent two years at Ridge View Academy, an all-male correctional school in Watkins, Colorado. 

The facility resembles a typical high school with 12 state-sanctioned sports teams, of which Roumph played for five: soccer, football, rugby, basketball and track.

Roumph was determined to make the most of his junior and senior year in high school, even if it was while he was incarcerated.

“You’re not putting your life on pause, you’re not going into a cell every day and just wasting your time, just wasting two years of your life,” Roumph said. “You grow academically, physically, mentally, spiritually.”

Jonathan Spencer, Roumph’s former coach at Ridge View, recalled first meeting Roumph at basketball practice.

“I thought he was a little knucklehead, he’s a cocky little dude,” Spencer said, laughing. “He’s still that kid for sure, his confidence probably walks in the room before he does, but he has other things that make him great also. He was a very confident, outspoken young man.”

Roumph said he took his two-year sentence seriously, becoming a captain for several teams and teaching his teammates that “overcoming so much on the field proves to them they can do the same thing off the field.” 

He also noticed changes in his teammates during his time at Ridge View. 

“It was a really great opportunity to see the effect sports had on some of the students as something that makes you feel good and proud of yourself while dealing with something that drives such self-disappointment and hopelessness,” Roumph said. 

Spencer said that Ridge View, opened in 2001 by the national company Rite of Passage, is one of the only facilities in Colorado that allows offenders to play on organized sports teams and have a “normalized high school experience.”

“Sports play a huge role,” Spencer said. “That gives the young men a chance to own something, take accountability, work for something.”

Thom Winter, a former coach-counselor at Ridge View, praised the facility’s rehabilitative approach that emphasizes “evidence-based therapeutic and educational programs” and offers sports, extracurriculars, vocational training and job opportunities.

“It’s a huge plus for the kids, gives them a physical outlet, gives them that team bonding,” Winter said.  

The bonds that Roumph built with his teammates and coaches were more than he “could count on both hands.” 

“Kind of finding some confidence in yourself that you’re not just some juvenile delinquent. You can do things and you can be proud of yourself and work hard at something,” Roumph said. “You don’t have to be the kid that everybody sees you as.”

Sports are one way for incarcerated youth to receive the 60 minutes of daily exercise recommended by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to improve physical and mental health. They can also build confidence and self-esteem while lowering the risk for depression and suicide, according to he National Youth Sports Strategy. 

However, some facilities don’t offer organized athletics, and many incarcerated youth aren’t reaching the 60-minute daily exercise mark, according to one study.  

“I think the opportunity to have an outlet like sports for a lot of these young men was huge,” Spencer said. 

Sports also helped Roumph when his grandfather, whom he called his dad, passed away during his sentence, Spencer said.

“Sports definitely helped him persevere through that extremely hard moment,” Spencer said. “I think if he was in a facility where there was not an opportunity for him to play sports, I think that definitely could’ve impacted him a lot different.”

His senior year, Sterling beat Ridge View and went on to win the state championship for the second year in a row, and Roumph reflected on the bittersweet game.

“It was exciting to show the new me,” Roumph said. “To come back and play them as a leader for a new team, it just made me feel like everything that I had done, everything that I had changed, was worth it.”

Spencer said he was proud of how much Roumph grew in just two short years, maturing and becoming a disciplined young man. 

Now 21, Roumph is studying sports medicine at Northeastern Junior College in his hometown of Sterling.

At the beginning of his sentence, Roumph admitted he was reluctant to tell people in his former life about being on a “jail team.” But now, he hopes that sharing his experience will show others how important sports can be in incarceration. 

“If somebody can make it more of a norm for athletics to be a part of the juvenile aspect of things, I think it could change the world,” Roumph said. 

Source art courtesy of Sam Roumph

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Literacy is one of the biggest predictors of whether or not a young person will return to the juvenile justice system once they are released. 

But since many juvenile detention centers have small-to-nonexistent libraries, it often falls to nonprofits to fill the gaps in the system with book donations and literacy programming.

Dieter Cantu got his GED at 16 –– the same year he was sentenced to 10 years of combined detention and parole in Texas. In the following four years, Cantu, an eager reader, was shuffled between three juvenile detention facilities, one of which had only a sparsely-stocked bookshelf for a library.

“There was maybe a dictionary, Harry Potter, I think there was some Dr. Seuss or something like that,” Cantu said. “It wasn’t interesting for me and it wasn’t going to help me to become productive once I returned back to society.”

After Cantu’s release, he started the Books to Incarcerated Youth Project in 2017 with the goal of delivering hundreds of books to halfway homes and detention centers across Texas, and later other states as well.

Without books, life in a juvenile detention center is reduced to months upon months of staring at the wall, Cantu said, which often results in bored kids making trouble.

“I don’t think … people who make these rules understand that that’s why kids a lot of times act out, because they’re not occupied mentally or physically,” he said.

But some kids need a little extra “boost” when it comes to reading, said Karlan Sick, the first president of the board of Literacy for Incarcerated Teens in New York.

A total of 85% of juvenile offenders have issues with reading, according to the Literacy Project Foundation. Since the 1990s, researchers have consistently linked reading problems to involvement in the juvenile justice system and identified literacy as a key ingredient for incarcerated kids’ future success. 

Sick, who was a librarian in the Bronx for over 20 years, founded her nonprofit after seeing the shortage of books in New York’s juvenile detention centers. She was inspired while doing her favorite thing about her job –– giving book presentations at high schools.

“At the end of a presentation, I could say, ‘Go to your local library and borrow [these books],’” Sick said. “Well, I learned there were high schools in the detention centers and, of course, they could not go to the local public library.”

So, at the suggestion of a detention center librarian, Sick created Literacy for Incarcerated Teens to supplement under-funded detention center libraries with books and magazines. Since retiring, Sick has devoted her time to running the volunteer-based organization, bringing author talks, writing workshops and cultural programming into detention centers across New York.

While literacy skills can help teens fill out job applications and succeed after their release, reading helps them in other ways, too, Sick said.

“I think it gives them ideas that the world maybe is larger than just their block, that they can do something with their lives,” she said.

While Sick’s nonprofit collects mostly “fun” fiction and nonfiction books for incarcerated youth, Cantu prefers that people donate more educational materials, such as books on African American and Latino issues, psychology and self-help, career and test prep, and texts on social movements. 

During his time in detention, Cantu got around the library dilemma by getting books from his older brother, who was in adult prison and able to buy them. From these books, Cantu taught himself sign language, learned about history and read Eldridge Cleaver’s account of his experience in the Black Panther Party.

Educational books can help kids succeed once they leave the system, teaching life skills and building mental resilience –– just as they did for Cantu, he said.

“[Reading] took me out of the space of what was going on at that present moment,” Cantu said. “If there was a riot, if there was extortion or even sexual abuse … a lot of times I could take my mind out of that by saying, ‘Hey, I got a test I have to do.’”

This preparation paid off. After release, Cantu went on to get degrees in culinary arts, public administration and business at several different universities. Today, he organizes book drives through his fraternity brothers in chapters across different cities and states. 

While becoming more literate can help kids who are already incarcerated, some researchers say reading problems can also funnel kids into detention. One study by researchers Christine Christle and Mitchell Yell suggests the juvenile justice system has become a “default system” for kids who struggle with reading.

Experts say the type of books in detention center libraries can determine whether or not kids engage with them.

Jeanie Austin helped build a book collection in an Illinois juvenile facility and is currently writing a book on library services for incarcerated people. They said in an email interview that librarians should work with incarcerated youth to determine what kinds of books the youth want to see in their libraries.

Austin said detention center libraries can intervene in the school-to-prison pipeline through building book collections that tell a more “truthful story” about the world than is taught in schools –– including information about Black and Latino cultures, queer and transgender people of color, and the experiences of sex workers. 

“In short, there need to be both fiction and non-fiction materials that include the type of complex power dynamics and situations that youth in detention might have already experienced,” they said.

In a 2010 paper about encouraging literacy in incarcerated youth, Stephanie Guerra, an author who teaches in Seattle University’s College of Education, notes the street literature genre was especially requested by kids in detention centers and might help them build reading habits. She calls street literature “reading materials in which readers can ‘see’ themselves.”

Sick, the librarian from the Bronx, said she found that book talks by African American authors often resonate with the teens she works with, since many of them are Black or brown themselves. But kids in detention centers enjoy all different types of books –– just like non-incarcerated kids do, Sick said.

“The kids react just the way teenagers would anywhere,” she said. “The teens are happy. And they like to have a distraction.”

Austin said, while they don’t consider the existence of juvenile detention natural to begin with, library services within detention centers can still be vastly helpful to kids.

“A social and political system that creates and maintains the practice of locking up youth cannot be liberatory, but youth inside can and do take steps toward their own liberation, joy and meaning making,” Austin said.

Source photo courtesy of Dieter Cantu

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Each of Richard Ross’s photographs starts with a knock on a kid’s cell door and an introduction to his work. Then he hands them his camera for them to take a picture. 

“You trust them with it,” he said.

By giving his camera to the children he photographs, Ross invites them to become participants in the image that they create together. For the past 15 years, Ross has traveled the country on a mission to document children and teens in solitary confinement. 

His award-winning series “Juvenile In Justice” captures the images of more than 1,000 children who are incarcerated at over 300 U.S. detention centers. His photos illustrate the ways in which U.S. detention centers manage kids through detainment, treatment and punishment. For Ross, the use of solitary confinement is an indicator of a failing juvenile justice system.

“I’m not really the activist,” Ross said. “But if you’re pushing legislation or policy, I have the images. I have the audio. I have the library to help you get your message out.”

Despite a lack of data, anecdotal reports from advocates across the country suggest the practice of solitary confinement is far too common throughout the juvenile justice system. Ross said he believes the data exist in a “cold fluorescent light” and that the images and voices of the kids are essential to building empathy and enacting change. 

Ross challenges his viewers to ask themselves how they would react if they came across a kid locked in a closet. For him, the answer should be easy. 

“You would immediately take them out and comfort them,” he said. “You would try and find out who put the kid in the closet and what their thinking was. You [would] try to hold those people accountable. Then you would also try to do something to explain to the adult in the room, [that] you can’t do that to a kid, it’s way too damaging.”

People often ask Ross how he was able to photograph inside detention facilities. At first, he said, access was easy. 

“I started going around to institutions, and I would go at least once a week,” he said. But when his photos became the catalyst for juvenile justice reform, “doors started closing in front of me,” Ross said.

In his photo series, Ross invites viewers to empathetically visualize the conditions of confinement that children endure. For advocates like Jennifer Lutz, an attorney for the Center for Children’s Law and Policy in Washington, D.C., and campaign coordinator for Stop Solitary for Kids, his images are a “game-changing tool.”  

“Photographs and images from inside juvenile jails and prisons undeniably show that these youth are not frightening offenders,” Lutz said. “Instead, they are children, no different from yours or mine. These images capture the inhumane, bleak, and overly-correctional conditions inside some juvenile facilities –– places where no child should be.” 

Across the country, more than one-third of children behind bars have spent time in solitary confinement, according to a report by the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia. A typical stay in isolation can range anywhere from a few hours to six months, leaving many with physical, psychological and often developmental damage. 

As a photographer and professor of art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Ross said he thinks of himself as a conduit for the voices of these incarcerated children.

“Each kid’s image and voice is compelling to me,” he said. “And it’s my job to pass it over to you, with the lightest touch possible and just let that kid tell the story.”

Ross’s photography is supported through prestigious grants from philanthropists Pam and Brook Smith, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He also was awarded Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships. 

The power of his images is their ability to illustrate the “inhumanity” of the justice system, said Laurie Garduque, criminal justice director of the MacArthur Foundation. 

“The system causes damage and harm, and it shouldn’t be this way,” Garduque said. “Behind the images is a narrative that compels people to ask why is the system this way and how can we change it. Richard isn’t issuing a call for help but action.”

Ross said his journey documenting children in the justice system began when his book  “Architecture of Authority” brought him to an ICE detention center in El Paso, Texas. It was here when he saw six detained kids in cells, with their backs turned toward him, that he realized the focus of his work was about to transform.  

“I was sitting there talking to them and I was the only way they were going to have a voice,” he said. “And then it really became a mission.”

Over the course of his 15-year journey documenting America’s isolated youth, Ross’s work, lauded by advocacy groups, filmmakers, writers, academics and policymakers, has helped to push legislative reform for juvenile justice –– notably exhibiting in the U.S. Capitol rotunda, along with state and local courthouses.

For Ross, his images are not for the traditional art student, but instead for the people who are most affected.

“My ideal viewer is the kid, to make sure that they know they’re valued,” he said. “The kid that’s been released, to make sure that their experience in this world has been noticed, honored and responded to. And the people that are going to change that policy for the future.”

Laura Abrams, a University of California, Los Angeles social welfare professor, used one of Ross’s images for the cover of her 2013 book, “Compassionate Confinement: A Year in the Life of Unit C.” 

“Youth imprisonment in this country is extremely diverse,” Abrams said, pointing to Ross’s collection as one that portrays the vast range of facilities. 

The kinds of juvenile facilities are as varied as the kids they detain. Some are old orphanages, some transitioned from mental health facilities into juvenile holding centers or treatment centers, some are group homes and some are locked facilities, Abrams said.

“A lot of people have an image of youth imprisonment as just being in a cell, [and] that fits some facilities, but a lot look more like dormitory style,” Abrams said.

In over 35 states, Ross has captured images of hundreds of facilities and isolation rooms. His photography showcases the vast range of detention types and the architecture behind them, while drawing the viewer into the blurred and obscured faces of kids in isolation.

Seeing these graphic images can and should be shocking, Lutz said.

“Much like [how] images of the murder of George Floyd have sparked a new awareness of racial violence and oppression, images of incarcerated youth speak to our shared humanity,” Lutz said. “We cannot look away. Ross and other artists’ work is a critical driver of reform, empowering advocates to compel justice professionals, judges, legislators, and other stakeholders to confront these realities and the urgent need for change.”

Driven by conditions children in detention facilities are subjected to, Ross sees no end for this project, calling it a moral imperative. 

“How do you walk away from it?” he said. “I can’t figure out how it stops unless it’s handing it off to another generation that’s going to say, ‘I’m going to make a difference, not in all these kids, but in some of them.’”

Lead source photo courtesy of Richard Ross

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