A Journey of Discouragement and Hope: An Introduction to Arts and Corrections

Some 20 years ago, I was a young writer invited to conduct a poet-in-the-schools residency in the school system of the Texas Department of Corrections. Two decades later, I am completing Arts Programs for Juvenile Offenders in Detention and Corrections, a technical-assistance program for six national sites through a collaborative initiative between the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). What began as a ten-month writing project has evolved into a career that has taken me into more than 100 adult and juvenile prisons in the U.S., England, Ireland and Peru. It has been a journey of discouragement and abiding hopeful possibility. I feel it only fair to provide the negative picture first, because this is work that exacts its toll on artists, administrators and correctional professionals alike, and if you’re not now engaged in the work, it’s fair you should know what you could be getting into.

From my perspective, there may be more inmates in America, adult and juvenile, who are participants in arts programs now than 20 years ago. On almost a weekly basis, I hear from a new program seeking to learn about the field and connect with others who are doing this work. However, as a percentage of our prison population, far fewer incarcerated folk have access to cultural resources than did the prisoners of the late ’70s and early ’80s. This is especially disheartening in that we have taken the anecdotal descriptions of criminal transformation into productive citizen scenarios that we experienced as artists working in corrections and proven them in the hardcore-data domain of longitudinal recidivist studies, reduced incidence rates of misbehavior, and cost effectiveness. Anyone who is interested in the practice of arts-in-corrections in America and who does the research should have no doubt that these programs stack up with and outperform any other treatment methodology working in the arena of corrections, be it education, vocational training, restorative justice, drug treatment — you name it. I’ve included a selected bibliography with this article that supports this claim.

The fact that we have no national program to promote and support arts programs for offender populations is an embarrassment that refutes our generally accepted identity as a pragmatic and fiscally conservative people. We did attempt such a program once. Bill Cleveland writes in the introduction to "Art in Other Places": "Prison arts programs were given … impetus nationwide when the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) and the National Endowment for the Arts combined efforts in 1977 to support the placement of artists in 54 state and federal penal facilities." In 1981, Oklahoma was still a participant in that program, and I received my early arts-in-corrections training at an annual gathering in Tulsa hosted by Institution Programs Inc. for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Today, there is no national authority promoting arts programs in correctional settings. The NEA and the Federal Bureau of Prisons do fund three one-year pilots in federal prisons every year, and the NEA can and does provide occasional grant assistance to state prison arts programs through its AcessAbility funding program. OJJDP has also entered into three demonstration projects with the NEA around providing arts programs to high-risk or court-involved youth. However, having just completed such a demonstration project, I believe that there is no interest in the Justice Department for revisiting a LEAA-style national arts program for adults or juveniles.

We have clearly defined best practices in arts-in-corrections, have enjoyed exchanges with the international community of artists and arts organizations involved in the field, and nearly every state in the union has had some experience with successful programs. Yet, a very small minority of programs has been sustained beyond a few years, and most never last longer than the initial grant that supported them. Using the military and public-policy language of the times, the primary reason for the transitory nature of these programs lies in the lack of an end-game strategy for our criminal-justice system. Eric Schlosser, in his important article for the Atlantic Monthly, "The Prison Industrial Complex," accurately describes a justice system that has become the remedy of choice for all the nation’s social ills — poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness — along with sociopathic behavior. Ever since the calculated disassembly of our "social net" in the late ’70s and early ’80s, our prison population has increased exponentially. When I began my work in 1981, there were about 25,000 inmates in the Texas prison system; now the total is more than 150,000.

Alongside increased incarceration rates came the removal of educational opportunities and incentives for inmate cooperation with institutional governance. Previously in Texas, prisons employed a system of "good time," whereby an inmate could take a day off his or her sentence for each day of good behavior. Privileges, such as access to college programs or a crafts shop or even an arts program, were used as incentives to make prisons manageable. Even then, rehabilitation was described to me as a myth to which corrections administrators paid lip service, but now even the myth has disappeared.

There is no longer any "good time." Inmates routinely serve mandatory sentences without a chance for parole, much less sentence reduction. PELL grants for inmates to attend college courses were abolished and community colleges dropped what was a very positive relationship with the prison system. (In the arts, if enough inmates with GEDs or high-school diplomas registered for an art class or creative writing, a college would offer it.) Our society became fearful as the media learned that crime stories improved ratings, and every politician, whether from the right or left, learned that a new law criminalizing undesirable social behaviors or increasing existing penalties was necessary for election. Massive appropriations were required to finance the construction of new prisons and staffing of officers to attend to an increasingly uncooperative prison population.

If the pendulum stopped here it would be bad enough, but unfortunately it has reached into the lives of our youth. Not only are we incarcerating juveniles at an accelerated rate and routinely certifying as adults those who commit violent crimes, we are merging the missions of the criminal-justice community with the institutions of public education through zero-tolerance policies. Increasingly, arts classes in schools are being diminished even though "Champions of Change" and other evaluation studies clearly demonstrate improved academic achievement for arts-involved youth. The schools appear to be retreating to the "basics" and testing for competency rather than heeding current pedagogical studies on multiple intelligences and the delineation of different learning styles in students, methodologies routinely manifest in arts programs. Worse, schools across the nation are creating and staffing alternative-education sites for disciplinary referrals. This was originally seen as an alternative to suspension or expulsion, but increasingly students never leave these facilities and as often as not the youth are referred to these schools by the courts and not the school system itself. Needed academic resources are being used to expand the services and treatments available to the juvenile-justice system.

That’s as far down that dark path as I want to go in this article. I feel obliged to do so because two of the folks I admire most in the arts-in-corrections field left the work this past year because, after years of effort, the system didn’t change, not just the national scheme of things, but on their own local and regional level. Their highly successful programs are still as fragile now as at the beginning.

Models of Sustainability

The good news is that some programs have persevered and remain with us after decades of on-going operation. These can serve as guides for how other programs can avoid the reefs. The California Department of Corrections has maintained a multimillion-dollar arts-in-corrections program in its adult facilities since the mid-’70s. This was achieved by securing enabling legislation and appropriations from the state legislature. Participating facilities, and these are most of the California prisons, have state-employed artist facilitators who then contract with artists and arts agencies for residency implementation. Once a line item is secured in the state budget and positions are created, it is difficult to sunset a program unless it is proven to be unsuccessful. The California AIC program has evaluated itself with rigor, demonstrating reduced recidivism rates among participants and reduced incidence rates of misbehavior, and then quantified that data into cost savings to the taxpayer.

The California Youth Authority replicated that model some ten years ago – employing an artist facilitator for the juvenile units in the northern half of the state and another for the south. Residency programming is still largely dependent on grants, but the program has secured a strong foothold. The California Arts Council has been a significant partner in keeping the program alive.

State arts commissions have also demonstrated leadership in working with state legislatures to develop initiatives, some of them on-going, for adjudicated youth and adults. The Mississippi Arts Commission has implemented the Core Arts Program, which is funded by a special appropriation from the legislature. It began with three programs in the state that would each be funded for three years. Two new programs are added each year. At the termination of the three-year grant, the individual projects can be funded through community arts grants if they apply. There are now seven ongoing project sites.

I have worked with or know of similar initiatives by state arts commissions in Utah, South Dakota, Alabama and Idaho. The Iowa Arts Council supported the creation of the HeARTland Collaboration, which created arts programs across the criminal-justice spectrum, adult and juvenile. This program became PARTners Unlimited, providing arts programming to two women’s facilities, a juvenile facility and alternative education sites for youth.

Other successful state-wide partnerships have developed between state arts organizations and state juvenile-justice authorities. VSA Arts in Florida teamed with the Department of Juvenile Justice several years ago to carry out an arts-in-juvenile-justice initiative with demonstration projects that were later sustained, and they provided seed moneys for every juvenile corrections department in the state to team with arts organizations for strategic planning. Recently, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Delaware partnered with the Delaware Department of Juvenile Justice to undertake a similar arts initiative for high-risk youth around the state.

One pattern that seems clear is that a collaboration between an arts organization and a criminal-justice organization is conducive to sustainability, and equal partnerships work best, i.e., state arts commissions/organizations with state corrections departments, local arts organizations with county probation departments, and so on. Very few programs begun by individual artists survive long. There are exceptions, such as Leslie Neal in Florida, who has carried out dance programs in women’s prisons for nearly a decade, but institutions in general tend to respect the authority of other institutions. It is difficult for an individual artist to maintain a good relationship with an institution when that institution’s administration is constantly changing.

Opportunities and Strategies

While the expansion of the criminal-justice system has been generally deleterious to the development of arts-in-corrections programs, it has also generated opportunities. The past two decades have also seen the expansion of community arts programs supported by community arts organizations and municipal cultural departments, but it has also become a necessary activity for nontraditional providers such as museums, ballets, university arts departments and symphonies. The implementation of arts residencies has gone far beyond its inception in schools, and now often occurs in hospitals and hospices, housing developments, faith-based institutions, shelters and nursing homes, and in after-school programs in almost any setting. This is not to say that the need for community arts is being met, but a strong cadre of community artists supported by arts organizations of almost every stripe has evolved.

We think of arts-in-corrections programs taking place in prisons, but most criminal-justice activities take place in the community through alternative education, probation or parole. The evolving arts-in-corrections model is more than the intervention model of an arts residency in a penitentiary or juvenile detention center. It is a prevention, intervention and after-care model. It provides cultural resources – skills-based arts training – in a system of linked services that tracks offender populations and meets them at every turn. The benefit of this to the criminal-justice community is that it brings coherency to a system that is largely incoherent, as youth move from probation to alternative education to detention to corrections to parole and back to alternative education without transition. Each setting brings a new scenario with new people and a new agenda. What the youth did in the last placement is largely unknown to the receiving agency. But the arts can be in all those settings, sometimes the very same artists. Arts organizations have generated expertise in developing effective community arts programs in all settings with a wide array of participants, and they partner with experienced artists who can do the work.

This was the philosophy that guided the development of two of the pilot sites in the NJJDP/NEA project I am now completing, Arts Programs for Young Offenders in Detention and Corrections. The Rochester/Monroe County project began as a collaboration between the Monroe County Children’s Center (a detention facility) and Rochester Arts Reach. The program soon expanded to county probation settings, state parole programs, a Teen Court and Industry, a state correctional facility for youth. Youth were tracked and artists made referrals to arts programs as the youth moved from one setting to another. The partnership expanded to include all these juvenile-justice institutions, and the collaborative meetings that took place resulted in the benefits of reduced territoriality, enhanced communication and greater cooperation among the juvenile-justice agencies. The ultimate boon was a partnership with the Northeast Area Development Corporation that was donated a building to serve as a community arts center in an enterprise zone. The ultimate strategy is to have a youth guild in the building that will serve as an arts training center for youth referred by the other programs.

Another site, West Palm Beach, was based in an Alternative Arts Center (AAC), an experimental arts-integrated school for disciplinary referrals from the school district. This in turn was housed in a much larger alternative education setting, the Roosevelt School, which had a majority population of court-involved youth. The school district also provided alternative education programs to juvenile corrections facilities in the area. Using artists from its regular artist-in-education program in the West Palm Beach schools and the AAC, the program expanded through the alternative education system to a detention center, a halfway house, a residential facility and the Florida Institute for Girls, a state correctional facility. Youth could move through the correctional programs and ultimately end up in the Roosevelt School or the AAC and from there, those students with demonstrated ability could move on to the regular arts magnet junior-high and high schools.

The strategy of using the arts not just as an instrument of therapy or exposure or conflict-resolution skills or skills instruction or self-esteem building in a single setting, but as a mechanism of holistic social reintegration of offender populations, has enormous potential. Multiple partnerships are required to carry out such a model, and that bodes well for sustainability. The greater investment of institutions, both corrections and arts, the greater the possibility of survival.

As a final note, this article in no way surveys the best arts-in-corrections programs in America or the finest practitioners. My purpose here was simply to point out what I see of the strong currents and hidden obstacles that could support or sink programs, and to call for a national policy that recognizes the great good that is being done.

REFERENCES AND READINGS

"Arts in Corrections Program Report 1987/88." Sacramento, Calif.: California Department of Corrections, 1987.

Brewster, L. "A Cost Benefit Analysis of the California Department of Corrections Arts in Corrections Program." Santa Cruz, Calif.: William James Association, 1983.

"Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning." Arts Education Partnership: http:/aep-arts.org , 1999.

Clawson, H and Coolbaughby, K. "The YouthARTS Development Project." Community Arts Network Reading Room, http://www.comunityarts.net, 2001.

Cleveland, W. "Art in Other Places: Artists at Work in America’s Community and Social Institutions." Westport Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1992; University of Massachusetts Arts Education Service, 2000.

Cleveland, W. "An Evaluation of the Core Arts Program: 1998-2001." Minneapolis, Minn.: Center for the Study of Art and Community, 2001.

Durland, S. "Maintaining Humanity: Grady Hillman talks about arts programs in correctional settings," High Performance #71, Spring 1996.

Ezell, M. "A Changed World: Experimental Gallery Evaluation of the Second and Third Year." Seattle: University of Washington, 1998. (Unpublished manuscript)

Hillman, G. "The Arts and Humanities as Agents for Social Change: Summary Report, 4^th International Congress of Educating Cities." Chicago, Ill.: Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, 1996.

Hillman, G. in King, L and Stodall (Eds.). "Anthologies by Correctional Facility Students, Classroom Publishing: A Practical Guide to Enhancing Student Literacy." Hillsboro, Ore: Blue Heron Publishing, 1992.

Hillman, G. with Gaffney, K. "Artists in the Community: Training Artists to Work in Alternative Settings." Washington D.C.: Americans for the Arts, Institute for Community Development and the Arts, 1996.

Hillman, G. "Kerouac’s Town, Dickens and Prison Art." The Texas Journal, Spring/Summer 1994.

Hillman, G. "The Prison Writer’s Workshop, Poetry as Therapy." New York City: Human Sciences Press, 1987.

McArthur, D., Law, S., and Moini, J. "The Arts and Public Safety Impact Study: An Examination of Best Practices." Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, Institute on Education and Training, 1997.

McConnel, P. "Guidebook for Artists Working in Prisons." Utah Arts Council, 1994.

Thompson, J. "Theatre and Offender Rehabilitation: Observations from the USA." Research in Drama Education, Vol.3 #2. London: 1998.

Thompson, J. "Prison Theatre: Perspectives and Practices (Forensic Focus 4)." London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers Inc., 1998.

Warner, S. "Arts Programs for Incarcerated Youth: A National and International Comparative Study." Seattle: Antioch University, 1999. (Thesis)

Weitz, J. "Coming Up Taller: Arts and Humanities Programs for Children and Youth At Risk." Washington, DC: The President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, 1996.

Williams, R. "The Art and Experience of Selected Women Inmates at the Taycheedah Correctional Institution." Tallahassee, Fla.: Florida State University. (Dissertation)

"YouthARTS, arts programs for youth at risk: the Tool Kit." Washington D.C.: Americans for the Arts, 1998

Grady Hillman is the author of "Artists in the Community: Training Artists to Work in Alternative Settings" and the forthcoming "Arts Programs for Young Offenders in Detention and Corrections: A Guide to Best Practices." He may be reached at gradyh@prodigy.net.

Original CAN/API publication: December 2001