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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Unlike the adult courthouse that stands beside it, the Clayton County Juvenile Court building has no grand columns or dominating facade, but rather a wall of windows and a lobby its creator likens to a Hilton Hotel.

The design of the non-traditional juvenile courthouse in Jonesboro, Georgia,  was spearheaded by Judge Steven C. Teske. He and the architects he worked with designed the space to reduce anxiety, comfort the traumatized and encourage collaboration between youth, justice officials and community leaders. The building reflects the judge’s commitment to restorative justice principles: he focuses on making human connections with young offenders in an effort to address the root causes of their behavior rather than merely punishing them. 

“You want to be encouraging,” Teske said. “The only way you’re going to help people change their behavior is through positive relationships.”

The building, officially called the Clayton County Youth Development & Justice Center, was constructed in 2012 to house the jurisdiction’s forward-thinking system, which has become a national model for juvenile justice reform. 

Teske has served as a juvenile judge since 1999. He inherited a system that was unorganized and overwhelmed with complaints from schools. In 2003, as a part of the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, Clayton County –– the sixth largest of Georgia’s 159 counties ––  invited community members and parents into the courthouse along with the youth to find solutions to the problems plaguing their lives and giving rise to their behavior. According to the county’s annual juvenile court report, since these innovative programs were enacted, detentions have declined by 70%.

According to Margaret J. King, director of the Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis think tank, traditional courthouse architecture –– like that of the Harold R. Banke Justice Center next door to Teske’s building –– evokes a specific feeling to the public. 

“Courthouses are intended to be imposing, to inspire awe, and when they are typically classical and overscaled, calculated to make us feel small and insignificant in order to communicate their authority and power,” she said. “They radiate the majesty and gravity of the law.” 

This is just the type of building Teske did not want to build. One of his central directives to the designers of the facility, he said, was, “I don’t want a traditional courthouse.”

For Teske, the physical differences between the juvenile court building and the adult one next to it mirror the philosophical differences in the courts’ goals. He said his system is not intended to dominate the people involved with it, but to invite them in to solve problems cooperatively.

“In the adult system it’s very simple: they’re being punished for a crime,” Teske said. “In the juvenile system, it doesn’t work that way. The kid’s brain is still under neurological construction.”

Architect Melissa M. Farling, an adviser for The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, emphasizes the role design can play in justice systems which aim to be “cooperative and collaborative.” The design of physical spaces, she said, “impacts our physiology –– I mean everything: emotional, psychological, neurological.”

In recent decades, researchers have accumulated a mountain of evidence supporting the central idea guiding the design of Teske’s courthouse: spaces influence people’s bodies and minds.

In one classic 1984 study, researchers split up patients recovering from surgery into two otherwise identical rooms with entirely different views out their windows: one a blank brick wall, the other a sunlit scene featuring leafy green foliage. Patients in the latter room, on average, recovered a full day earlier than the other group and required fewer strong narcotics to ease their pain.  

“People who come into [the facility] are traumatized,” Teske said. “And when they are intimidated, they tend to shut down. And when they shut down, they don’t talk. And we got to get them to talk about what their issues are.”

The juvenile justice building’s lobby is flooded with sunlight and filled with art from school children of all ages in the community. Large windows offer views of a courtyard with trees outside. 

According to environmental psychologist Sally Augustin, these design features reduce stress, boost mood and encourage broad thinking. This type of thinking, she said, is critical to “problem solving and getting along with others.” 

Augustin said the design of a place has an especially pronounced effect on people’s minds in high stress or high stakes situations. In these cases, like when a child is appearing at juvenile court, she said, people “look for clues in their world” to orient themselves and make sense of the situation. 

At Teske’s facility, interview rooms where young people meet with probation officers and other officials are housed in private spaces on the first floor. This way, the adults come to the child, which Augustin said can offer them a sense of comfort and ownership of the place. This, she said, indicates to the young people in the courthouse that they can work with the system cooperatively.  

Augustin said this feature can impact the power dynamic between the young person and justice worker who sees them. The adult will always have the power and authority, she said, but “things get equalized, to a certain extent” when the young person is allowed to claim their territory before the meeting begins. 

Tucked away at the top of the building is Teske’s domain, the courtroom. It is the least accessible part of the facility, because, he said “it is the least frequented place” there. He doesn’t want to judge young people involved in the juvenile justice system, he wants to talk with them. 

Since starting his dialogue-based reforms, Teske has seen less and less activity on the top floor –– exactly the goal of his columnless, conversation-oriented system and building. 

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