Zakiya Cherif of Philadelphia was at work when she received the call that her 17-year-old son, Zaphir Reddy, had been arrested. 

“I was scared. I was really scared. I feared for my son’s life,” Cherif said.

Cherif’s life quickly changed. On top of being heartbroken, she said the costs have been enormous because of legal fees and all the time she has taken off work for court dates and visitations. Before COVID-19, she was visiting him once a week, renting a car to drive 2 1/2 hours to the Loysville Youth Development Center in Loysville, Pennsylvania, where he has lived this past year. Cherif’s son was sentenced for two years in 2019 for a crime she didn’t want to discuss.

She also pays for extra food and toiletries.

“There is not enough food being given to the children,” Cherif said. “You have to order it through a system that they have set up with the prisons.”

Because of the enormity of the financial, emotional and psychological burdens on families of those incarcerated, small and large nonprofits around the country often step in to try to fill the voids, to help parents navigate the complicated justice system.

“What you see is a juvenile justice system that does not allow for family input or family participation. Very few juvenile justice systems work with families,” said Liz Ryan, president and CEO of Youth First Initiative, a national advocacy campaign to end the incarceration of youth and direct resources to community programs for youth.

Justice for Families reported in a study that 75% of families of kids in the juvenile justice system face financial barriers related to transportation and time. Fifty-one percent said their annual household income amounts to less than $25,000, while the national median income for families is twice that. 

Single parents like Cherif struggle more with only one household income to pay the price of incarceration. One study indicated that more juvenile offenders come from single-parent families, particularly mother-only families.

The Youth Art and Self Empowerment Project in Philadelphia, also known as YASP, is Cherif’s first support system. YASP staff members support mostly Black and brown families, helping parents understand the justice system legal jargon and processes, filling the courtroom with support during court dates, and helping their children reenter the community after incarceration.

 “They kept note and kept me focused and paid attention to things that I wouldn’t know to pay attention to,” Cherif said. “So that was my support.”

“And then my church family made sure they attended the trial dates,” Cherif said. “They kept my son in prayer, they checked on them. They visited him. They wrote him letters. And my family, too, they started to step up as well.”

Cherif began volunteering for the Philadelphia group after her son was incarcerated, as payback for the help it provided her. She became a member of YASP’s “youth participatory defense hub” when she realized how limited support there is for people who look like her son, an African-American male. 

“You feel like you failed to keep your child away from the legal system,” Cherif said.”… He’s already got several strikes against him and then to add the incarceration on top of it.”

She now sits with other mothers and fathers in court and tries to help them through a juvenile justice system that she said doesn’t work for many of them. She doesn’t want other moms or dads to go through what she did.

Across the country, In Wichita, Kansas, Tyler Williams is a founding member and a community organizer with Progeny, a youth/adult partnership focused on alternatives to youth imprisonment. Williams and others in this youth justice advocacy group also mentor kids and get them involved in juvenile justice reforms in the community. 

His passion for advocacy and reform grows from his own experiences. 

Starting at 13, he spent six years at a juvenile facility. He now works with youth at risk of getting in trouble with the law. He also helps those readjust after being in detention.

After his release at 19, he and other formerly incarcerated youth worked to build Progeny.

“We were really young, really just trying to make a change and a difference in our community, as youth who have been directly impacted by the system and have firsthand knowledge,” he said.

They saw problems that a lot of youth are facing due to what Williams describes as holes in the justice system.

“We wanted to be out there, try to make a change, give the youth a voice – to enact policies that are a lot more beneficial, not only to youth, but to also … the communities and victims as well,” Williams said.

Earlier this year, the advocacy group created a “COVID-19 call to action,” requesting that Kansas develop a better plan for keeping youth safe in juvenile detention facilities. They called for such things as halting new admissions, finding alternative living options, and providing immediate medical care to detained youth.

“While some jurisdictions have canceled visitation, we believe that this is not a time for youth to be separated from their support systems,” said Williams in July. “This will only exacerbate mental health issues and further isolate youth.”

Another Progeny effort is the “Invest Don’t Arrest” campaign, which is working to reimagine the juvenile justice system and reinvest in community alternatives.  Williams said one of Progeny’s goals is to close Kansas’s last youth prison, investing those funds into the community instead and keeping families whole rather than sending kids to detention facilities.

Ryan of Youth First Initiative said the best, most effective programs for young people across the country are ones that work with the whole family, not just with the young person.

“It’s really a question of are we willing to do the right thing here and keep kids together with their families? And invest in youth and their families.” Ryan said. 

Another organization, Youth Advocate Programs Inc., or YAP, a nonprofit with offices nationwide, uses a “wrap-around” model to support families impacted by their childrens’ incarcerations. 

Jeff Fleischer, president and CEO of YAP, explained that his organization receives a small portion of money that originally would have gone to incarcerating youths and instead invests in the families of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth. The group mentors, counsels and helps both kids and parents find jobs. 

“We’re the alternative to incarceration,” Fleischer said.

Resources are redirected from incarcerating young people and redirected to serving the entire family, Fleischer said. Advocates are assigned to a whole household and are available to provide support to not only the youth, but the parents and siblings as well. 

“They have a team of people now that are supporting them. They have an advocate that’s in their home for 10,15 hours a week,” Fleischer said.

Tyler Williams agrees the approach in reforming juvenile justice today has to go beyond the youth. It needs to be community-based, he and other nonprofit leaders say.

“In order to help heal not only yourself you got to heal the other people around you because it’s a community,” Williams said. “And if there’s one bad thing in the community, then we need to help fix it.”

Source for art: Artwork created by youth during a Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project workshop

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Since the May 25 killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police, there has been a wave of advocacy that has successfully removed police officers from public schools.

But Floyd’s murder did not start the movement. It added fuel to a fire that has burned for decades in communities of color. 

The story of school policing is one that is rooted in the fights for civil rights and education equality. 

In 1948, the Los Angeles School Police Department, which would go on to become the largest school police department in the nation, was created to combat violence in newly integrating schools, according to a 2017 ACLU report. Around the nation, as schools began to integrate, the notion prevailed that bringing Black students into white schools would also bring violence. 

Police presence grew in schools and so did its opposition. In 1971, Boston’s Black Student Federation staged a boycott of its public school system. Nearly half of the Black students in the city stayed home from school during the week of Feb. 8, according to a report in the Journal of Urban History. Among their demands was “the removal of police from schools and surrounding areas.”

Decades later, amid the uprising following Floyd’s murder, a handful of school districts have answered renewed calls to remove police from schools. Advocates say police escalate school discipline situations and their strict surveillance of communities of color disproportionately funnels those students into prisons, according to the ACLU and the Advancement Project, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. 

Despite their proliferation after the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School, there is no evidence that school resource officers actually make schools safer.  The Advancement Project identified 62 assaults by school police officers between 2009 and 2019.

In Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, the decision to end the school district’s decades-long contract with the local police department came just over a week after his death. In Oakland, the city voted to disband its school police department a month after his death, after falling one vote short in March.

But for both cities, there was a George Floyd before 2020. 

Four years earlier in a suburb of Minneapolis, 32-year-old Philando Castile was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop just outside of Minneapolis in front of his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter. 

It was just the latest highly-publicized offense in the fraught relationship between police and the Black community. A day earlier, Alton Sterling was shot and killed while selling CDs  outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

“We don’t need to tie that history to learning environments in our schools and to also be developing fake narratives around what police actually mean when we are seeing differently every day what police mean to our communities and how that history continues to live on,” said Kenneth Eban, director of policy and advocacy for the Advancing Equity Coalition in Minneapolis.

Talks of eliminating school resource officers began in the Twin Cities following Castile’s murder, Eban said. 

Nearby, a Minneapolis suburb ended its contract with local police departments in 2017. After several incidents of excessive force, Intermediate District 287 in Plymouth, Minnesota got rid of its police officers and replaced them with student safety coaches, trained to de-escalate conflict and address students’ mental health needs.

The battle was ongoing. 

“We wouldn’t have gotten here, even with everything that happened with the murder of George Floyd, if we didn’t challenge the school district and the school board’s values a year earlier, when the Minneapolis police department had done other racist things,”  Eban said. 

In Oakland, the Black Organizing Project’s work zeroed in on removing police from schools in 2011 after the murder of Raheim Brown, a 20-year-old Black man who was shot and killed by an Oakland school police officer. It launched its Bettering Our School Systems (BOSS) Campaign.

After realizing how deeply embedded police were in their schools, the campaign launched efforts to reform the police in schools. Not only was there a school police department, but the schools also contracted a number of city police officers and school resource officers, said Manning.

“Police in schools were normalized,” said Ni’Keah Manning, the advocacy group’s program coordinator. “It was so normalized that it wasn’t even questioned.” 

The campaign started with small reforms, such as formalizing a complaint policy against officers to empower students and parents, and establishing a memorandum of understanding to limit the power the city’s police department had in schools. 

Despite their victories in reform, Manning said the goal was always complete abolition. 

“We knew in organizing that a system will only revert back to doing what it was designed to do. And there is no one to make sure they’re being held accountable,”  Manning said. 

The international uprising caused by Floyd’s murder was a catalyst that created a moment of opportunity,  Manning said.  

“It was divine timing,” she said. 

On June 24, the Oakland School Board voted unanimously to eliminate the Oakland Unified School District Police Department.

Now, in both cities, the next step is providing alternatives to police in schools. 

In Minneapolis, there had been research for at least 10 alternatives prior to the decision to end the contract with their police department, though none had been approved, according to Eban. 

Manning said the work of the next two to three years will be creating a safety plan that gives the community a seat at the table and focuses on restorative practices that emphasize repairing harm caused by wrongdoing, rather than punishment. 

Source art courtesy of Black Organizing Project

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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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When Jayanti Demps-Howell was 9 years old, he was suspended from school in Flint, Michigan, for a cartoon superhero drawing he had made at home and brought to school. 

He had done the same thing plenty of times before — drawing artwork at home and then bringing it to school. When he was upset about receiving a bad grade, he expressed his feelings through his drawings. He drew a cartoon strip of a teacher entering a classroom giving out bad grades, and a superhero blowing her up.

He was suspended for three days for “threatening a teacher.” 

Dawn Demps, his mother who has had a career in education for much of her adult life and is currently earning her Ph.D. in education policy and evaluation at Arizona State University, said he was expressing himself in a healthy age-appropriate way, and was concerned that this “threat” would show up in the future.

“It makes it look like he came in there and he threatened the teacher,” his mother said. “Like he never spoke to the teacher.”

Jayanti Demps-Howell experience isn’t an anomaly. A 2019 study by Princeton University found that Black students are four times more likely to receive suspensions than white students.

This was the beginning of the now 15-year-old’s aversion to school. His mother remembers his attitude towards school changing after the suspension. 

Dawn Demps said her son isn’t much of a talker, and when it comes to serious stuff he expresses himself through art, so she asked her son to draw self-portraits of how he views himself and how he thinks the school views him when he was 13.

Jayanti Demps-Howell drew himself as Goku — his favorite character on Dragon Ball Z. 

“What I was saying is that I perceive myself as being awesome and being cool, to me in my own eyes,” Jayanti Demps-Howell said.

But when he drew himself from the school’s perspective, he drew himself reaching for a graduation cap with a target locked on his chest. He said it represents how people don’t want Black men, like himself, to succeed.

“And as an educator, that kind of hurts. But as a researcher, I understand,” Dawn Demps said about her son’s feelings towards school. 

That drawing led Dawn Demps to construct a project asking other kids who had been suspended to draw the same thing. She found that most kids saw themselves achieving their dreams, but thought the school viewed them as failures. She is currently writing an article about her project to discuss the results.

“These kids are very deep. They are not lost on what’s going on,” she said. 

As part of her dissertation, Dawn Demps is studying the Black Mothers Forum, a local Arizona collective of Black moms working to dismantle the school to prison pipeline. When Dawn Demps shared the artwork with the group, Debora Colbert, executive director of the Black Mothers Forum, said it showed how many kids, especially Black kids, feel predestined for prison.

“Imagine being 5 years old. And having your hands handcuffed behind you because a teacher said you were a threat,” said Colbert. 

A 5-year-old in Arizonan did get handcuffed for this reason, and the Black Mothers Forum helped the family advocate for themselves, Colbert said. When Dawn Demps’s son was suspended a second time from his Arizona high school, the forum helped the the family as well. 

Colbert said a big focus of the group is empowering parents to advocate for themselves and their children when it comes to school discipline. Currently, they are helping parents navigate the reopening of schools amid COVID-19.

In the wake of closed Arizona schools, Dawn Demps is working to create a curriculum to educate her son through experiences rather than a classroom. Part of this curriculum is connecting him with successful Black men in the community to show Jayanti Demps-Howell a variety of career paths.

The first man he spoke with was Ronald Young, who goes by Chef Ron. After their conversation, Jayanti Demps-Howell made an Instagram account — @jaycookz_04 — to showcase his cooking, and Jayanti began looking into culinary schools. His mother said this was the first time he showed interest in education after high school.

Dawn Demps said that even if schools open back up, she’s not sure if she wants him to return.

About her son being home, Dawn Demps said: “I know my son is safe. I know nobody is targeting him. I know nobody is stereotyping. I know nobody is going to call the police on him for him doing something that teenagers do.”

Source photo courtesy of Dawn Demps

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Will Lewis and Zyion Houston-Sconiers entered the juvenile justice system as teens on opposite sides of the country. They were both raised in poverty, lacked a stable family life, and joined gangs in search of companionship. 

After they put their youth cases behind them and aged out of the juvenile system they found themselves back in trouble with the law. In Tacoma, Washington, cops caught Houston-Sconiers with a gun in a backpack, and near Atlanta, Lewis was arrested in an alleyway where a robbery took place. 

Recidivism — defined as a “relapse into criminal behavior” — has long been used as a primary indicator of a juvenile system’s success. However, experts argue that measuring when a system fails and youth reoffend should not be the only way to know how well it is working.

Juvenile recidivism is measured differently from state to state, making it difficult to compare jurisdictions, said Melissa Sickmund, director of the National Center for Juvenile Justice.

“Personally, I have tried my damnedest to not use the word recidivism,” Sickmund said. “One, people can’t understand it right. Two, people can’t spell it right. Three, nobody really knows, ‘What do you mean by that?’” 

Sickmund said some jurisdictions measure whether a youth is arrested, others whether they’re found guilty of a crime, and others whether they are committed to a secure facility. All of these methods of determining recidivism yield vastly different results, she said.

In 2019, the federal government reauthorized the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2018. In it, lawmakers now require the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), for the first time, to establish a national standard for measuring recidivism. 

But as things stand now, by OJJDP’s own admission: “National recidivism rates for juveniles do not exist.” The best they have is data from 2006, attributed to Sickmund, which shows 12-month rearrest rates to be 55%, reconviction rates to 33%, and recommitment rates to be 12%.

Sickmund said that for adults, recidivism data usually focuses on how many adults return to prison after they’re released. However, she says that metric won’t work for juveniles, because kids have much more varied types of contact with the system — they may, for example, go through a diversion program, initiatives that offer youth alternatives to formal processing in the juvenile system, or be put on probation. 

Additionally, Sickmund said there is oftentimes no reliable way to link adult and juvenile offenses. The two court systems are distinct and rarely share records. 

Houston-Sconiers’ and Lewis’ later offenses are the type which most recidivism statistics won’t capture. 

Lewis was 18 when he was arrested in the alleyway. At the time he was awaiting decisions on college applications after completing a rehabilitative second chance program offered to him by his juvenile judge, Steven Teske. 

As Lewis tells it, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time — and Teske believed him. Teske, who was not involved in Lewis’ adult case, said that after reading the police’s incident report, he found Lewis’ story “really quite believable.”  

Police charged Lewis for committing a burglary, which is a felony. Lewis took a plea deal, which resulted in a short stint in prison. 

“We don’t give up,” said Teske. “He was now in the adult system and we were supportive of him.”

Because of Lewis’ future plans to get into the aviation industry, Teske said they knew he could not have a felony on his record. So the judge intervened. 

“I appointed [Lewis] an attorney specially to file a motion to expunge that offense and went to the district attorney and she agreed,” Teske said. “In fact, I actually helped out the defense attorney because he was doing pro bono. I prepared the consent order, gave it to him. He took it to the D.A. (district attorney) who signed it. Took it to the judge who signed it to remove that felony from his record.”

Now, Lewis’ record is clear of his adult crime. In May, 2020, he graduated from Middle Georgia State University with a master’s degree in cybersecurity and he aspires to get his Ph.D. by the time he’s 30. 

Houston-Sconiers didn’t have the same luck. Since he was released from prison early after his juvenile crime as the result of a relatively high profile Washington State Supreme Court case, he said he felt like he had a target on his back. Police officers across the community recognized him and, he said, on multiple occasions stopped and searched him — sometimes violently. 

“When I first got out, it was a movie, man. I enjoyed it. Life was treating me good. But once that movie was over, life was real, it got very real for me,” Houston-Sconiers said.  “When I didn’t know what else to do, what was natural to me came.”

One day in November 2018, Houston-Sconiers was wandering his Tacoma neighborhood on foot, looking for a ride home. He had just been released from the hospital, where he had been diagnosed with bronchitis and prescribed medication. 

According to Houston-Sconiers, who studied official reports related to his case in detail in an effort to mitigate his sentence, police officers were watching the area he was walking. When Houston-Sconiers got into his friend’s vehicle, he said the police followed him. Three officers pulled them over for running a stop light, searched the car, and found a backpack with drugs he maintains were not his and a gun he admits was his own. They arrested and charged Houston-Sconiers for both. 

“When you think about it, when did you ever get pulled over by three officers for a traffic stop?” Houston-Sconiers said. “They knew what they were doing.”

Thanks to Washington State’s three-strike system, designed to crack down on repeat offenders, Houston-Sconiers was facing life in prison without the possibility of parole for getting caught with a gun in his friend’s car. He said it’s a dangerous part of town, and the gun helps him feel safer. 

Like Judge Teske with Lewis, Washington State Sen. Darneille sympathized with Houston-Sconiers’ side of the story, and did some, as she calls, “extraordinary interventions” to help him. After Darneille vouched for Houston-Sconiers before his prosecutor and judge, his sentence was reduced from life to 11 years. He’s one year into it now. 

“I wish that we could make these kinds of interventions on every person’s case,” Darneille said. “[People] can become ill, can die in this system. Losing relationships, losing educational opportunities, losing self-esteem, losing hope is common throughout our system.”

Beyond the technical problems it presents, Sickmund and other advocates — like Sean Goode, the director of a diversion program near Seattle — argue against using recidivism as a metric because it ignores the positive things a person does. 

“I think recidivism is a horrible data point,” Goode  said. He prefers not to focus solely on whether a young person becomes involved with the criminal justice system again, but “what are they engaging in as an alternative [to criminal behavior], and I think that is super substantive — and probably the most difficult thing to measure.”

Each morning, when Houston-Sconiers awakes in his cell, he reads aloud his concrete plans for the future: to be an author and semi-truck owner and operator by 2024. 

“I wanna be a millionaire,” he said. “And I want my kids to be billionaires. That’s how I know I’ve succeeded — if my kids do more in life than me.” 

Zyion’s wife, Arrogrance Wood-Houston, has no doubt in his ability to achieve his ambitious goals. 

“Everything that you hear, I promise you it’s gonna come to life,” she said. 

Today Lewis travels the country, telling his motivational story to judges, kids, and other audiences, hoping to inspire kids like him to turn their lives around and adults in the justice system to empower them to do so.  

Lewis also wants to transform his hometown of Riverdale, Georgia. When he was a kid, he said, the “poverty was extreme — rats, roaches. It was real tough.” He wants to spark interest in IT and aviation among his community’s youth, providing certification training that can allow them to make $20 an hour out of high school.

Both 25-year-olds are married, raising children, and have firm convictions to improve their communities. None of those things register in measures of recidivism. 

“You’re measuring success by measuring failure,” Sickmund said. 

Source art courtesy of Arrogrance Wood-Houston

The post Why recidivism statistics don’t tell the full story appeared first on Kids Imprisoned.

When Ron Brown College Preparatory High School first opened in Washington, D.C., in 2016, some community members initially pushed back. In a Washington Post article, people commented that the “young kings” sounded like a gang and accused the school of segregating D.C. students.

But this didn’t stop Ron Brown College Prep from creating a safe space for its Black male students using restorative justice principles as a foundation. Instead, “young kings” who enter through the doors of the high school are greeted by staff who aim to empower their students through a loving and supportive environment.

After desegregation, Black schools that once served as safe spaces either replaced Black teachers with white teachers or disappeared altogether. As a result, Black students have been overrepresented in the school-to-prison pipeline ever since, researchers and child advocates say.

Ron Brown College Prep hopes to dismantle this. 

The public high school specifically curated for male students of color was a product of Benjamin Williams’s experience in school and his drive to make a difference. 

Williams, the founder and former principal of the school, grew up in foster care with his brother, living in many homes and attending many different schools. While Williams was more successful academically, he said his brother was just as capable –– he just needed different support. 

He said he and his brother would have benefitted from a school like Ron Brown.

Williams was observant growing up. He said he always noticed how people who looked like him were treated: first in his middle school, high school, then college. When he began a career in education, he saw it firsthand.

Researchers from Princeton University found that in 2019, Black students were 2.5 times more likely to be referred to law enforcement, 3.5 times more likely to be arrested and 4 times more likely to be suspended than white students. 

This is when Williams said he realized, “It’s not just me and my brother, it’s more than that.” 

Charles Curtis, a psychologist and restorative justice coordinator at the school, said if school were in session right now, students would probably be talking about police brutality in their morning community circle, which starts off each day connecting them with one another.

“Community circle is really where we connect. We also get in the habit of being together, sharing ideas, doing social and emotional work,” Curtis said. 

Curtis said that Black spaces like the school are important, especially for boys in their adolescence who are growing up in a country that doesn’t accept them.

“It is fundamentally hostile to their existence, to their mental health, to their opportunities to progress,” Curtis said. “They are criminalized. This is their life.”

Built on restorative justice

The morning circle is fundamental to the restorative process at Ron Brown. This process focuses on the reason behind the student’s behavior and connects them with the community and the person they may have harmed, rather than suspending and expelling students as a default. 

Curtis said schools often look at situations warranting either restorative justice or exclusionary discipline. 

“There is no ‘which’ at Ron Brown. It is always restored,” he said. “Even in the most severe scenario where the young person did get suspended, our effort is always restorative.”

Curtis is a part of the CARE Team, which supports students and teachers in restorative practices. It’s made of counselors, psychologists, social workers, a director of empowerment and culture, and other school administrators.

The team addresses school culture, climate, restorative practices, and social and emotional learning, according to the Ron Brown website.

Teachers are also encouraged in their classrooms to address any conflicts or disruptions instead of sending kids out of the classroom. Students participate in peer circles, which use a restorative justice model to address and repair situations between classmates. 

Williams said he was intentional in bringing restorative practices into the school to help students learn accountability.

“You also have to make sure that you hold yourself in a way that you are willing to speak up for yourself. And that’s not something that most of our young men were expected to do prior to walking into the space,” Williams said.

Curtis said involving students in these practices is important because it helps them cultivate skills to not only help them navigate their experience in school, but outside of it as well.

A culture of love

Christian Johnson, who goes by CJ, was heavily involved with the school’s restorative justice practices when he was a student. He led morning community circles and sat in on restorative justice circles as part of the junior CARE team.

Johnson, who graduated with the inaugural class in June 2020, said his experience at Ron Brown shaped him into the leader he is today. He still remembers his first day walking into Ron Brown. 

“I had my jacket newly dry-cleaned, my tie was perfect, my shirt was pressed,” he said. “I was ready.”

As soon as he walked in, he and his fellow classmates were called “young king” by school staff. He said the day started with a morning community circle and greeting his brothers, a ritual that took place every day of his high school career. 

Calling students “young kings,” was a part of a constant push to empower students to take control of their own fate, Curtis said. He said this is deliberate because Black students are often exposed to narratives about what is wrong with them.

“We were intentional about every time we speak to them or of them that we were naming what was right about them,” he said. “You are special. You are important. You are a ruler. You are most of all the ruler of yourself. You decide where you are going.”

Johnson said he remembers Williams stressing the importance of taking advantage of the opportunities the school had to offer. 

The school takes students on college tours as early as ninth grade. Curtis said this exposure is important, because it shows the students that they have options and opportunities to create their own destiny.

Johnson said the moment that stuck out to him the most during his time at Ron Brown was when his stepfather passed away in June and the whole school reached out to him. He said he didn’t expect to be embraced the way he was, but that it speaks to the family culture intrinsic to the school.

“The school hours end when they end, but we don’t ever stop belonging to each other,” Curtis said.

Johnson said Curtis is like his uncle, and that he continues to ask Curtis for advice about both  small and large life decisions. Their relationship extends beyond the school walls, and Curtis continues to support Johnson as he begins the next chapter at Howard University, playing basketball and studying finance.

Johnson said he thinks Ron Brown was built on culture, and that restorative justice contributes to the positive culture he experienced. 

“The loving and the caring that the teachers have and the staff have for everybody is Ron Brown itself,” Johnson said.

Source photo courtesy of Christian Johnson

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The two-story house with the white vinyl siding and concrete steps leading up to the door looks ordinary from the outside, but it isn’t.

On the south side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sits the Courage House, Wisconsin’s first licensed group home for housing displaced LGBTQ youth. Opened in 2019 by Courage MKE, a nonprofit dedicated to serving Wisconsin’s LGBTQ community, the home can house up to five youth at a time.

Residents come from the child welfare system, homelessness and the juvenile justice system, said Brad Schlaikowski, Courage MKE co-founder. LGBTQ youth are overrepresented in both the homelessness and juvenile justice populations, statistics that can often be traced back to non-affirming families and runaway behavior.

An estimated 20% of kids in the juvenile justice system identify as LGBTQ, compared to only 4-6% of the general youth population. LGBTQ youth are also more than twice as likely to experience homelessness than their heterosexual peers.

In 2015, Schlaikowski founded Courage MKE with his husband Nick after they began fostering young girls who identified as LGBTQ and heard what they were going through.

“The stories that they were telling us of their experiences in shelters and group homes were horrible,” Schlaikowski said. “One of the last ones that came to us … she literally had bloody patches in her head because the girls [at her group home] were pulling her hair out because she’s bisexual.”

The Schlaikowski’s decided to hold a fundraiser for a Milwaukee homeless youth shelter and ended up raising almost $16,000. They kept the momentum going, and eventually received enough community support to buy the house.

“The community response [has been] overwhelmingly humbling,” Schlaikowski said.

Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, Schlaikowski said Courage MKE was about to make an offer on a second house that was going to be a drop-in youth shelter. However, this was put on hold due to financial uncertainty, he said.

Inside, the house is decorated with calming grays and blues, with pops of rainbow here and there, said house supervisor Jenna Sterr. 

Sterr, who has been at the house since April 2019, said she does everything she can to cultivate a family environment for the kids. On a typical day, she arrives in the morning to make breakfast and get them ready for school, and prior to COVID-19 she tried to get them out for weekend activities as often as possible.

One of the most important things for Sterr is to make sure each resident has someone in the house to look up to and share things with.

“I don’t think there’s one kid that has come into this house that I have not bonded with,” Sterr said.

Because the Courage House staff’s ultimate goal is to reunite each child with their parents, residents also participate in therapy sessions with their family.

The therapy sessions take place in a second building behind the house, which Schlaikowksi said makes things easier on the child.

“At least here, they’re still kind of home,” Schlaikowski said. “And so the family comes and they all meet in the back house … and it’s completely private.”

One of the most important things about the Courage House is that each child is free to be themselves, when they may not have had that opportunity before, Schlaikowski said.

“This is the first and only time in their life that they have been able to not worry about what someone’s thinking about who they are and how they identify,” Schlaikowski said. “My favorite part is when these kids just are able to … embrace who they are.”

For everyone working and volunteering at the Courage House, leaving an impact on each child’s life is a priority. Sterr recalled throwing a party for a resident’s birthday, and the boy told her he had never had a birthday party before.

“It just kind of shocked me,” Sterr said. “So we did all kinds of things for this resident … it was really just touching that all the other residents came together to make his birthday so special.”

The children aren’t the only ones that are impacted, Sterr said.

As a member of the LGBTQ community herself, Sterr said finding the Courage House filled a hole in her life.

“I 100% have found what I [was] missing,” Sterr said. “I really love that I am able to be myself and be open and teach the kids that it’s OK to be yourself and show them that you can be an adult and grow up and be who you are.”

Source photo courtesy of Courage MKE.

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One San Francisco area nonprofit helps incarcerated girls find the connection between their mind and body through an activity viewed by some as exclusive, privileged and lacking in diversity — yoga.    

Former nurse practitioner and founder of The Art of Yoga Project, Mary Lynn Fitton, saw a pattern of young female patients seeking help for conditions like substance abuse, anxiety and depression.  Issues she knew through her own practice, could be remedied by yoga.   

“I really felt that there was this gap,” Fitton said. “We had talk therapy, we had pharmaceuticals, and I felt like it needed to be so much more. It needs to be in the body.”

With the juvenile justice system at its focal point, The Art of Yoga Project brings movement and art to the underserved population of girls Fitton once helped in her healthcare career.  The group encourages youth to look inward, teaching self awareness, understanding and respect through an activity that may otherwise be out of reach due to race and socioeconomics.

“I wanted all the young women that I saw to have that same sense of coming home to their body to learn to have a positive self dialectic,” Fitton said, “to improve their relationship with themselves.”

The 15-year-old organization has grown into a team of 50 art, writing and yoga teachers, visiting 26 sites one to three times a week in the San Francisco Bay Area, including five juvenile facilities in three counties. 

Fitton said the project prides itself on sourcing teachers from within, creating pathways to jobs for formerly underserved youth through yoga teacher training scholarships.  It also provides workshops and programs to educate staff on how to work with at-risk youth. 

“We realized the importance of having teachers that represent the population that we serve,”  Fitton said. “Because of mass incarceration and because of social injustice, we have primarily Black and brown girls. So we strive to help our teachers match that population and body, body identity, body size, gender identity.”

Despite a body of research proving the universal mental and physical health benefits of the Southeast Asian tradition, yoga’s role in American society has become a phenomenon of racial exclusivity, largely reserved for the white, rich and privileged. 

“Seeing [The Art of Yoga Project] come to the shelter was one of the first times I saw a yoga teacher of color, so that was very affirming for me,” said Sadie D., now a teacher with the nonprofit. “I’m a Black woman and at the time, I felt very insecure about my interest in yoga because the spaces that are meant for it are predominantly white and [cost] a lot of money.  There’s a lot of class disparity there.”

Sadie, who asked that her last name not be used, was homeless in the Bay Area since about the second grade, before she was aware of what being homeless really meant, she said. The now 24-year-old was introduced to The Art of Yoga Project in 2013 when she attended a yoga class at one of its partner studios in Redwood City for her birthday. 

She later received a scholarship from the project to complete her yoga teacher training, and has been an instructor for the past five years. She said the opportunity came full circle for her when she taught her first class at the shelter she once lived in. 

“I was happy for the opportunity and really humbled, grateful that I could be in a space that I had been in and be a reflection for the youth. I really identify with them,” Sadie said.  “It didn’t feel like it was out of the question for them to want to pursue something like yoga.”

Though never incarcerated herself, Sadie said she knew the struggle to survive from her own childhood experiences, and while teaching in juvenile facilities, was overcome with emotion. 

“It felt a lot more vulnerable being in those spaces with them, in a good way though,” she said. “That was one of the first times I’ve cried from teaching yoga…They make an impact on you.”

At one of the San Mateo facilities partnering with the group in 2012, many youth reported prior abuse, neglect, dysfunctional family dynamics and addiction, said Danielle Arlanda Harris, a professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University in Australia and former research director for The Art of Yoga Project.

“They’d done some of these things that were horrible, but they hadn’t done them because they wanted to,” Harris said, “…they had done them because they had been so horrifically abused and were so vulnerable and were from such horrific backgrounds that I just couldn’t fathom.”

These occurrences are known as Adverse Childhood Experiences are apparent in an estimated 70-90% of juvenile offenders and if left untreated, can leave traumatic effects on a developing child. 

“Sometimes you don’t even want to be connected to your body,”  Sadie said.  

The Art of Yoga Project considers the perspective of traumatized youth, presenting each class as a set of choices to restore the youth’s sense of power over their body, even during vulnerable yoga postures or when their eyes are closed,  Harris said. 

“Downward dog and puppy pose and even child’s pose, it can be awfully triggering to a body that has experienced sexual trauma,” she said. 

Implementing a set of practices with an understanding for adverse childhood experiences in mind is what qualifies behavioral management and therapy programs as being trauma informed, according to a 2016 report by the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice.  

“When I got [to the facilities], I really realized it was so much more about social injustice and trauma,” Fitton said. “We quickly had to learn to be trauma informed before that word was even known, before people were using that term, before people even talked about trauma.”

Even with trauma informed practices, the positive impact of yoga on incarcerated girls is hard to quantify,  Harris said. 

“I was constantly being asked to provide evidence that the program was working right,”  Harris said. “The question was always… ‘How many downward dogs does it take to reduce recidivism?’…I wish I could tell you.”

Harris said she did see change in the girls’ demeanor.  On days that The Art of Yoga Project held a class, Harris noted fewer fights in the facilities, girls began to open up more in group settings and privately in written reflections.

“I had taken yoga for years…But these girls, they were in their bodies,”  Harris said. “They would talk about it and they’d write about it in the journals, about being a woman and thinking about it in ways I had totally taken for granted.”

To track the progression of education or a learned skill, Harris said researchers administer tests before and after to measure the difference.  Since yoga is an internalized practice, Harris adjusted her methods to a series of check-ins with youth throughout eight weeks of yoga.  

Instead of a drastic increase in positive internal dialogue or self image responses, Harris said participants were honest, authentic and reflective in their check-ins, as yoga encouraged their own mindfulness.

“We weren’t able to reach statistical significance,”  Harris said. “But that was the moment, I think, that I learned that qualitative research is where we need to be. Because answering all of these questions with numbers doesn’t tell the full story.”

Sadie said the impact of yoga has made on her life can be traced to one moment.

“I got overwhelmed with emotion that I couldn’t really explain, but it didn’t feel chaotic… It felt like I could move in it,”  Sadie said.  “It’s one of those things that feel so personal that it’s hard to even put into words why and how it matters.”

The instructor guided the class into a variation of a wide-legged forward fold — a posture that compresses the body at the hips and changes perspective by redirecting the gaze.  Sadie said in this posture, she felt in control of her life. 

Newly 18 and living in a shelter at the time, Sadie said she felt strength.

“That moment, I remember it,”  Sadie said. “After that I remember feeling my body more.  Feeling powerful in my own skin.  I could walk taller. I felt that connection, it’s like something I hadn’t realized I was missing.” 

On and off her mat, Sadie shares a common mission with The Art of Yoga Project. 

“Right now, my thought is that there is more of a need to provide yoga in the spaces who don’t have it,” she said. “People of color and bigger bodies.”

Source art courtesy of The Art of Yoga Project

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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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Aaron Kinzel still struggles to process trauma that follows over a decade after his release from imprisonment as a teenager. Now as an adult, he hosts art therapy workshops to help others overcome the effects of youth incarceration. 

Kinzel is now the director for the Youth Justice Fund, a Michigan-based nonprofit that supports former child offenders as they re-adjust to life beyond bars. He strives to help men like himself work through their mental health issues and reacclimate to society in mental health support groups with formerly incarcerated men and art workshops where participants work with their hands to release repressed internal issues. 

“It’s not just art,” said Kinzel. “But to re-enact some traumatic event. To me, it’s really cathartic.”

Kinzel spent the latter half of his teen years in the juvenile justice system and most of his 20s in adult corrections centers in Michigan and Ohio. During his first three years as a teenage prisoner, he cycled in and out of solitary confinement for aggressive behavior and stayed for as long as 10 months at a time, he said.

He said the demons he envisioned in the system now inspire his creations. His most recent project “re-enacts” a hallucination he remembered from solitary confinement when he went three days without water.

For this project, Kinzel poured clay into a piece of bronze metal, creating the image of a skull layered over his face.  

It’s the exact image he visualized as a kid, he said. 

Creating a tangible version of his mental image using clay and bronze helps him overcome trauma in his past and quite literally puts the power back into his own hands, he said. Kinzel’s most recent project required months to complete.

Many of the individuals Kinzel works with failed to receive the mental health and trauma-informed support they needed while they were imprisoned, he said. 

“When I first came home…I was so screwed up mentally from this experience that I couldn’t connect with my wife. She didn’t understand why I was getting these PTSD responses,” Kinzel said. “Trauma is deeply embedded in your psyche.” 

A 2017 literature review by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention showed that many kids in the system faced trauma or violence before they were incarcerated, and observed that difficulties youth faced while entering the system could exacerbate existing conditions while increasing their likelihood of returning.  

Other former child offenders have joined alongside the Youth Justice Fund in embracing art therapy. Lorenzo Harrell, 44, similarly struggled to speak his feelings as a child in an adult prison. 

Growing up in Detroit, Harrell attempted to steal a Michael Jackson jacket with his brothers.  That day, at the age of 9, Harrell was arrested for the first time.

He spent the remainder of his childhood in and out of arrests and alternative placement until he was placed in an adult correctional facility.  In total, Harrell estimates he spent 26 years incarcerated.

Today, Kinzel places a personal emphasis on helping others break through stereotypical expectations of masculinity, he said.

“Men are supposed to be masculine. We’re supposed to run the shot and run the world, which is really a false narrative,” Kinzel said. “Men can be emotional.”

The idea for the mental health support groups, also known as Wednesday Wellness, originated with Harrell. 

“That’s when you normally see a lot of guys similarly situated to myself, guys who spent decades in prison come out and really talk about what they’re going through,” Harrell said. “All of us are going through things.”

Harrell also participated in the art workshops, he said, presenting his creation as a gift to his mother on her birthday. 

Shaping clay and metal, Kinzel invites fellow formerly imprisoned kids to share a safe space, working with their hands to confront the injustice and trauma of the past through their artistic expression as adults.

“We’re taking something that’s thrown away –– garbage that’s rusting away –– and we repurpose it,” Kinzel said. “It’s kind of a good analogy of our lives.” 

Source photo courtesy of Aaron Kinzel

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