A Prison Sits Empty. A Nonprofit Moves In

As a social worker accustomed to prodding the minds of adjudicated youth in the juvenile justice system, Noran Sanford has long been an inquisitive kind of guy. So when he discovered that six prisons had closed within a 50-mile radius of his home in rural Laurinburg, N.C., including one in the nearby town of Wagram, he began asking questions. Lots of them. “It was in that moment that I began putting together the idea that somebody should do something with these large sites,” Sanford says.
Enter the concept behind GrowingChange. The organization launched in 2011 to help reform and empower young ex-offenders, some barely into their teens, as they work to turn the abandoned prison in Wagram into a community farm and education center. The first group of 12 participants recruited by Sanford had all been arrested, expelled from school and kicked out of their homes — a combination of risk factors that Sanford calls the “unholy trinity,” especially when living in one of North Carolina’s poorest counties.
The Wagram site, which partially opened to the public for tours in October, has worked with 18 formerly incarcerated youth since its inception, with seven active participants today. The group was able to secure the property from the state’s Department of Public Safety, who agreed to donate the land after Sanford and two of his youth leaders pitched the idea. Sanford hopes they will eventually be able to sell the soil amendments and organic produce they’ve cultivated. So far, participants have grown food for needy local families, and are working to repurpose jail cells into aquaponics tanks and guard towers into climbing walls, among other initiatives. GrowingChange also provides intensive group therapy for its youth leaders.

This former prison has become a community farm and education center.

Analyzed over a three-year period, the prison-to-farm program was 92 percent effective in preventing recidivism among participants, Sanford says.
As the program has matured, so has its group of original participants, some of whom have stayed on to act as mentors to new recruits. Other young ex-offenders have been working to expand GrowingChange’s reach with a graphic-novel series, called Prison Flip Comics, that chronicles their troubled past; the goal is to use the comics as a learning tool distributed throughout North Carolina’s system of juvenile justice offices.
There are also teens who have embraced a more public-facing role, speaking at outside events and otherwise “sharing their stories about a personal experience of change,” says Simon Stumpf of Ashoka, which awarded Sanford a fellowship last year for his social entrepreneurship. Ashoka also provided funds to help scale GrowingChange. Sanford’s long-term goals include flipping 25 former prisons by 2025; currently, he estimates around 300 prisons sit empty across the U.S.
Despite GrowingChange’s small number of participants, other organizations have taken notice, reaching out from places as far away as the Netherlands, where Sanford traveled to present his model. And students from schools including the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have helped in areas like designing site plans and mapping the area with 3-D technology to share with the public what the site — which will eventually include housing for veterans and a counseling center — will look like once fully completed.
Sanford hopes to inspire prison authorities, government leaders, nonprofits, universities, foundations and others to think differently about unused prisons, taking an open-sourced approach by sharing what has, and hasn’t, worked at the Wagram facility. And that has him dreaming big.
“Our hope is to create a federated system of independent sites,” he says.

The Legislation That Has the Potential to Reduce Youth Recidivism in California

The California juvenile justice system is caught in a depressing Catch-22.
It’s common knowledge that schools are one of the best ways to keep kids out of trouble. But for the troubled ones that are sent to juvenile hall, they face very difficult odds of reenrolling in class once they’ve served their time. This often means that if these kids aren’t readmitted, they are back on the streets — missing out on an education and possibly turning to a life of crime.
Nationwide, 80 percent of incarcerated juvenile offenders end up behind bars again. For California — the state with the highest rate of incarcerated youth — this has to stop. But now, a new bipartisan-approved bill (currently waiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature) could change this troubling statistic, VoiceWaves reports.
AB 2276, authored by Assemblymember Raul Bocanegra, could ensure “that juvenile justice-involved youth have a successful educational transition when they return to their local schools, and creates a process to help promote best practices for this transition.”
MORE: The Radical School Reform That Just Might Work
California’s juvenile court schools have the highest dropout rates in the state. VoiceWaves reporter Michael Lozano explains that “of the roughly 42,000 youth who attend California’s juvenile court schools each year, only 20 percent successfully reenroll within 30 days of their release from the system.”
Why do these kids have so much trouble going back to school?
According to Lozano’s report, when a child is released from the juvenile court system, school records are not immediately transferred from probation officials to the county office of education. This means that schools might force these kids to take redundant classes, or in a much worse case, deny these students from enrolling completely.
What’s troubling is that the majority of the country’s incarcerated youth are locked up for non-violent offenses, such as California high schooler Tanisha Denard, who served time in juvenile hall after racking up repeated truancies because she often couldn’t afford the bus to school, VoiceWaves reports. After being released, school officials did not allow her to reenroll at her former school. Luckily, she found another school to attend — but it wasn’t easy. Denard tells the publication that she only had five days to gather her numerous academic records, find a school that would actually accept her, as well as negotiate with her probation officer for an extension during her search. “A lot of times you get out from juvenile hall, and they look at you like a criminal, [and] they’re not likely to send you to a school where you’re likely to be successful,” she says.
There’s also appears to be a lot of miscommunication between the state’s probation offices and education departments. AB 2276 aims to reform a current law that would require these agencies to work together, expedite a student’s documents, as well as collaborate with local education organizations that help a child successfully reintegrate back into school. The bill would also create a stakeholder group that would study successful reentry programs and report back to the legislature.
ALSO: Foster Kids Need One Thing to Succeed in School. A Former Teacher’s Goal Is to Give It to Every Single One
It’s wrong to deny these kids another chance at an education, especially since most of them just want another shot. As Assemblymember Bocanegra says in his bill, “In 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice found that more than two-thirds of youth in custody have ambitions of higher education.”
It’s currently unknown how much the bill would cost; the creation of the stakeholder group alone would reportedly require $100,000. The Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, who has urged passage of the bill, found that the cost of a year of incarceration for a youth who does not reengage is $180,000. Additionally, the organization says that “youth who do not successfully transition back into school after leaving the juvenile justice system and drop out cost the state $46 billion a year, including $12 billion in crime costs alone.”
For California’s formerly incarcerated youth, this might just be a very small price to pay.
DON’T MISS: How Portland, Ore., Is Translating Student Grit Into Success

Can Writing Poetry Help Set Incarcerated Youth on the Right Track?

“You don’t understand what it’s like.”
“You never listen to me.”
Most teenagers make these over-the-top complaints to adults at some point during those angst-filled years. But for some troubled teens, these emotional statements aren’t hyperbolic. And those are just the kids that Richard Gold wanted to help.
When Gold left Microsoft 18 years ago, he started the Pongo Teen Writing Project, a Seattle non-profit that connects with troubled teenagers who are in jail, homeless, in the foster care system, or being treated for mental illness, and teaches them to write poetry to express themselves. Since 1992, Pongo has served 7,000 teenagers, providing them with volunteer writing mentors and publishing their work in anthologies.
Gold told Jeffrey Brown of PBS NewsHour, “What so many of us struggle with is the unarticulated emotion in our lives, and when poetry serves that, it’s doing something essential for the person and for society.”
Through one of Pongo’s programs, writing mentors visit juvenile inmates individually for an hour, asking questions about their lives and emotions to guide them toward writing poetry about their experiences. The mentors transcribe what the inmates express, collaborate on revisions, then give the teenagers a chance to read their work aloud to the group.
Pongo volunteers do similar work at the New Horizons homeless youth center Seattle, helping homeless teens write poems, and hosting poetry reading events.
The workers in the juvenile justice system attest to the difference Pongo makes in the lives of the teens it works with. Warden Lynn Valdez at the King County Juvenile Detention Center, once an incarcerated gang member himself, said that after the teens write their poems, “the reward is, I think that they have actually released something that they have repressed inside.” King County Juvenile Court Judge Barbara Mack said that the young people she sees in her court “have never really learned how to express themselves. And Pongo gives them the opportunity to do that in a way that’s not threatening.”
It’s clear that poetry can be a powerful tool to make teenagers feel valued as they try to move past their rocky adolescences and become productive adults.
MORE: Poetry Program Offers Hope to Detroit Schoolchildren