(C) South Dakota Searchlight
This story was originally published by South Dakota Searchlight and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Children in detention center learn about ‘fixing our mistakes’ in art and life • South Dakota Searchlight [1]
['John Hult', 'Ashley Murray', 'More From Author', '- Tuesday September', '- September', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']
Date: 2024-09-10
A student in an art-as-therapy class at the Minnehaha County Juvenile Detention Center in Sioux Falls works through an exercise. (John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight)
SIOUX FALLS — It’s a quarter to 5 on a Wednesday afternoon, and art instructor Lisa Brunick wants her students to expel some energy through color and short bursts of chaos.
Grab two crayons, she says, and hold them in your fist facing downward, “like you’re 2,” over your sheet of white paper.
‘A Journey Through Art’ Rehfeld’s Underground in Sioux Falls will host a free, one-night exhibit of art produced by detainees at the Minnehaha County Juvenile Detention Center on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. The show runs from 5 to 7 p.m., with talks from art-as-therapy instructors and the leaders of the Sioux Falls nonprofit Journey of Hope starting at around 5:30 p.m.
“Now scribble. Hard and fast. Go. Go, go, go!” Brunick says, watching the clock as 10 seconds tick by. “Now … stop!”
The students repeat the process four times, each time swapping out the colors in their fists.
Then Brunick tells them to tear up the white paper and reassemble their work onto another sheet of paper – like a puzzle, she says, but don’t let the pieces touch. The gaps are to be filled with gold paint.
It’s a lesson inspired by “kintsugi,” a Japanese method of pottery repair that uses gold instead of plaster to make broken art more beautiful than it may have been before.
The term’s literal translation, she tells her pupils, is “gold joinery.”
“It’s a process of fixing our mistakes,” Brunick says. “Instead of saying ‘I blew it, that’s the end of it,’ we can say ‘I blew it. How can I make it better?’”
Kintsugi is just one lesson in Brunick’s yearlong curriculum, but only Brunick will make it a whole year.
The 30-year educator with art therapy training leads courses at the Minnehaha County Juvenile Detention Center in Sioux Falls, one of South Dakota’s largest facilities for young offenders. It houses kids from more than two dozen counties in the state’s southeastern quadrant, usually for days or weeks, not full semesters.
Brunick uses a curriculum where each lesson builds on the last, but the lessons are also self-contained enough to work for a transient population that may only attend a course or two.
“You don’t need to do the full course to learn something,” Brunick said.
Brunick and another teacher named Amanda Berger work through a nonprofit organization called Journey of Hope, founded four years ago by the family of a young man who struggled with mental illness and addiction.
On Thursday night from 5-7 p.m., the public will have an opportunity to see the work of the itinerant young artists when Rehfeld’s Underground in downtown Sioux Falls hosts a one-night exhibition called “A Journey Through Hope.”
All-volunteer support
In a criminal justice setting, structured arts coursework falls under a category of programming called “evidence-based,” meaning it’s known to reduce the risk of re-offending by kids who take part.
But the center in Sioux Falls doesn’t have the money to pay for it.
Nor can it pay for animal meet-and-greet visits with staff from the Great Plains Zoo, financial literacy courses from Lutheran Social Services, nutrition courses from South Dakota State University or talks on oral health from Delta Dental.
It’s only through the generosity of the community that the center can offer anything more than regular school coursework for every kid and mental health counseling for the ones at risk of self-harm, according to the center’s assistant director, Nate Ellens.
When vetted volunteers and nonprofit organizations want to help without sending the county a bill, Ellens said, “it’s an easy yes.”
The yearlong curriculum from Journey of Hope’s instructors and its goal-oriented approach are particularly welcome.
It may be rare for kids to stay at the center for an entire school year, but many of the kids who wind up detained stay longer than they used to.
“We’ve had an increase in youth charged as an adult that are here for an extended period of time,” Ellens said. “So we really do have programming needs, but we don’t have a budget for it.”
Sioux Falls isn’t alone in its limits, said Center Director Jamie Gravett.
Federal regulations require at least one staff member for every eight detainees in juvenile facilities, which means Gravett needs more staff on hand than he would if he ran an adult facility. It costs more than $400 per day to house a juvenile, he said, with 70-80% of that money going to salaries. The center is also building a replacement facility, which will add nearly $100 a day to the cost the center charges its partner counties for room and board.
Gravett isn’t thrilled about the limits to programming for the kids in his care, but he also knows property taxpayers aren’t thrilled about their rising bills – in Sioux Falls or other cities with large juvenile facilities, like Rapid City or Pierre. He doesn’t love that the only counseling he can offer to kids who aren’t in immediate danger comes from Volunteers of America counselors who offer their time for free.
Lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to address rising property taxes during the 2024 session, but they did agree to conduct a summer study on the issue. The emphasis of those discussions is property tax relief.
“I haven’t found anyone yet who’s happy to see their property tax bills go up, and I can’t blame them,” said Gravett.
Gaps in care
Journey of Hope’s mission is to fill in the gaps created by tight budgets.
Kari Palmer and her husband founded the group in 2020 after their son died of an alcohol overdose. He’d struggled with addiction and depression, and at one point spent six months at the JDC in Sioux Falls.
The group’s goal is to support “the whole person,” both in and outside of correctional settings by offering, at no cost to taxpayers, what overburdened institutions can’t.
Her son’s experiences serve as a guide. He left the Juvenile Detention Center without basic hygiene items, for example, which got her thinking about the other kids who’d been there.
“We would provide that for him, but so many other people don’t have family there because bridges have been burned or whatever,” Palmer said. “We recognized that there was a much greater need in our community.”
That’s why the group’s first effort was to organize the delivery of hygiene kits to kids leaving the center, but also to people in parking lots or approached by volunteers with Church on the Street, a group that ministers to the homeless.
“It’s a bag to say, ‘You know what? The community is here to support you. Here’s something to start your journey with. You’re not alone in this,’” Palmer said.
Art as therapy, Palmer said, is a way to offer community support to those who find themselves inside institutions, often after experiencing trauma at a young age.
As with the hygiene kits, the idea was inspired by her son’s experience at the center. Inside an institution, she said, there are emotional needs that go beyond the basics of survival.
“At his wake, I learned from people that he would play his guitar and he would sing,” she said. “It would just bring them hope on their journey, and just bring them a level of peace. And I wanted that. I wanted that for people.”
Palmer wanted something “a little more in-depth,” which is why she reached out to Brunick, a longtime art teacher and certified art therapist. What started with Brunick and Berger at the center has since expanded to include biweekly yoga instruction there. Another instructor leads singing bowl sessions at the Glory House, a halfway house in Sioux Falls about a block from the Juvenile Detention Center, twice a month.
SUPPORT NEWS YOU TRUST. DONATE
Rehabilitation useful for juveniles
Palmer has some grant applications in review that she hopes will open up more expansive programming. Ideally, the group would be able to deliver the arts curriculum to families at home after a juvenile’s release.
It’s important to fill a child’s incarcerated days with more positive influences and fewer hours in cells, she said, but also to continue to support them after release.
If kids are detained, Palmer said the community should be asking “how are we helping them, as a society, to heal?”
Palmer worked with University of South Dakota Criminal Justice Professor Jenna Borseth on those grant applications.
Regarding therapeutic art programs for juveniles, “there’s a lot of research that has shown they can be quite effective,” Borseth said, even though there are some questions as to whether it’s the arts aspect or the individualized attention that helps.
“It might be that really pouring time into people and giving them resources and giving them tools to deal with their anger, and maybe a class focused on managing anger or understanding empathy, could be equally effective,” Borseth said.
Kids in South Dakota tend to reoffend at lower rates than those in other states, she said, but there are areas for improvement. There are disparities in outcomes for Native American children, for example, who are more likely to reoffend than kids of any other race in the state.
Targeted programs with cultural elements could make a difference, Borseth said.
“There is a growing body of research that really suggests just taking any effective programming and throwing it at that population specifically is not optimal,” she said.
Course completion rates are another wrinkle in South Dakota’s juvenile offender population. Kids in the state are less likely to finish evidence-based treatment than kids in other states, she said. More incentives to keep kids involved in programming, such as sentence reductions or clearing a child’s record for completion, could be worth a look.
“Things like that can provide some opportunity for them to engage in the programming that we know is going to help them in the long run, but that they might not buy into right now,” Borseth said.
From the center to the gallery
Ellens can’t say he’s seen dramatic changes in the kids specifically because of the art classes. It’s not as though students return to their rooms as obsessive sketch artists or suddenly become model residents after a few sessions.
What Ellens does see are improvements in their coping skills. Kids who practice using the techniques they learn in the arts course can turn to them to handle their emotions in difficult moments, he said.
“A lot of the kids do great until something doesn’t go their way,” Ellens said. “And that’s where programming like art comes in. It’s the connections, the skills they learn in there, the connections they have to the facilitators, and then just art in general being a release for them.”
Brunick knows not every lesson will land. Some students struggle with certain prompts and crumple up their work in frustration; others stay quiet and barely engage during their initial lessons before opening up.
After the first of her two sessions on tearing paper and putting it back together, Brunick noticed that one young man struggled to see the purpose of the exercise. He loves to draw and has talent, she said, but he’s typically meticulous and precise with each stroke.
“Oftentimes that’s a red flag that their life is out of control, it’s full of chaos, and they just need to pull it together. They want desperately to have control. They need to have that control, like ‘give me a pencil and a piece of paper any day,’” Brunick said. “So being this loose like this, it takes courage.”
Brunick wants visitors to Thursday’s art show to see that courage, even though they won’t see it on the faces of the artists. To protect their privacy, no artist names will be attached to their work.
Which is not to say the students don’t appreciate the attention. When Brunick first pitched the idea of an art show, she said one boy “just about jumped out of his chair.”
“He was like ‘yes, we want people in the community to know we are not just criminals in here, we’re people with potential and talents, and we want to show them that,’” she said.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://southdakotasearchlight.com/2024/09/10/children-in-detention-center-learn-about-fixing-our-mistakes-in-art-and-life/
Published and (C) by South Dakota Searchlight
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/sdsearchlight/
