When you arrive at DeNier Youth Services Center, there are four automatic-lock doors, two security posts, and a full-body metal detector between you and the children incarcerated there.
On Wednesday morning, the metal detector went off about 28 times. In the meantime, a young detainee breached the entrance and made for the parking lot.
Mike, the 17-year-old detainee, didn’t escape.
He came back with part of a drum kit.
The show
Music is a big deal at DeNier. Thanks to Rite of Passage, which operates the state juvenile detention center, new DeNier teacher Jessica Wood, and groups such as iAM Music – which goes there each week to perform songs and give music instruction – it’s becoming an even bigger deal.
In a bleak environment of strict rules and intense emotion, it’s easy for DeNier students to despair, said Eli Cover, DeNier’s transition coordinator. Music offers them a bridge to hope, to the outside world, to joy, freedom, creativity and confidence.
On Wednesday morning, with Mike’s help, it took less than 20 minutes for iAM Music’s Ashley Edwards, Jesse Ogle and Easton Stuard to move the rest of the drum kit – as well as amps, guitars, and basses – into DeNier’s Pod B.
Inmates, under the watchful eye of several staff members, shuffled through the doors and took their seats. Some looked like young men, others like young children. More than a few boys had cultivated studiously tough exteriors; despite their hardened air, they seemed like fragile, upset souls.
Edwards, lead singer of Hello, Dollface, and an instructor with iAM Music, began singing. The band started rocking out.
The effect on the room was total and immediate: One boy closed his eyes, another started smiling, a boy sitting in the front row began tapping his feet. Even one of the tough guys sitting in the back started nodding in open admiration as Edwards hit every note.
After a few songs, Ogle asked whether any DeNier kids wanted to try the drums, and demonstrated a basic beat. Five boys volunteered. Two tried the keyboard.
Later, Mike performed two original raps. The sheer quality of his performance was startling. His lyrics were intricately constructed, his timing was deft. And he rapped passionately about his troubled childhood, dwelling on the decisions he made impulsively and now regrets.
Edwards said she was bowled over by the DeNier students’ progress. When iAM music came in for the first time five weeks ago, “not one of them could play a cord.
“We were isolated in a room with five students, who were sharing their history, sharing their music. One kid said, ‘I am just happy to have somewhere to sleep at night, I don’t even have a home.’ From that time forward, I was just so moved – when you’re in that hole, you’re so in a hole. You can’t even imagine what it’s like to wake up every day in that place with the doors locked,” she said.
Music man
Prison music has a long tradition, from the old Scottish ballad Bonnie Mary of Argyle – which helped Nelson Mandela survive Robben Island – to Johnny Cash’s live recording inside San Quentin.
DeNier’s transition coordinator Eli Cover said life could be tough for the kids in DeNier.
The center can hold up to 28 detainees. At the moment, it’s below capacity, and there happen to be no girls behind its walls.
There isn’t a lot of space to move around. There’s a small classroom, a small library, a small cafeteria and an indoor gymnasium that, in the context of DeNier’s confined spaces, seems cavernous. For exercise, the kids run 3 miles most days of the week, meaning 33 laps around an outdoor track ensconced by a tall chain-link fence.
There are a lot of rules at DeNier. When in Pod A or Pod B common rooms, you have to ask permission to move – a policy adopted to reduce intragroup violence. Inmates can’t wear sneakers inside their bedroom, nor hang anything on the walls.
It’s a stressful environment, said Cover, who’s been with DeNier for four years. He said staff turnover is so brisk, employees become veterans a year in. DeNier isn’t supposed to serve kids with mental disorders, but children with deep-seated issues nonetheless come.
“Sometimes, I think the kids are brave just to get up in the morning,” he said.
Music matters
As in all strictly controlled societies – whether the military, boarding school or sleep-away summer camp – small distinctions of hierarchy hugely matter at DeNier. There, inmates who earn “room of the week” are allowed to listen to the radio whenever they want. Mike said when he wins this honor, he turns it up, so the whole Pod can hear it.
In an open letter, Kenny, who graduated from Durango High School last year, wrote of his yearlong stint in DeNier. Though anger-management therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, drug and alcohol classes and academic work featured in his weekly schedule, it was a bleak, demoralizing life. At the time, DeNier students had no access to musical instruments.
Then a band from Music in the Mountains performed. “The positive energy lasted long after they left,” he said.
The DeNier students began making music the only way they could. “We did have our voice to sing or rap, pencils and paper to write lyrics, and a surface to make a kick and snare off of,” he said.
Kenny said he preferred the music to DeNier’s formal therapy. “Music is very therapeutic in itself, and out of all the therapy we receive, I feel like it’s the most basic and primitive therapy.”
These days, Jessica Wood, a Durango School District 9-R teacher, oversees DeNier’s rapidly developing music program. Since she began this year, there have been more music-themed visits.
“We had cowboy poets, and iAM music visits every Wednesday morning,” she said. “But it’s evolved into more of a class for kids. Music is a huge part of their lives, and it’s part of their salvation. I’ve been surprised to see how into it they are,” she said.
Music isn’t just spiritually enriching: it’s academically vital. In the last 10 years, neurological research has demonstrated – in study after study – that music education in early childhood profoundly advances children’s literacy and foreign language acquisition. Later, it improves kids’ SAT scores, on average by 41 points in math and 57 points in the verbal section, according to the College Entrance Examination Board.
“Research also shows background music, when it’s familiar, can help with focus, concentration and multitasking.” To seize this benefit, she said constructs playlists for DeNier students, based on their tastes and what they find comforting.
Wood said the music doesn’t have to be classical. “It can be country, rap or heavy metal, so long as it is familiar,” she said.
Mike, DeNier’s resident rapper, was eager to get in practice time on the now-resident keyboard.
He said when it came to school subjects, “math is alright,” and he likes history. “But piano, I love piano.”
“I love music. It’s not normal for me without music. I get mad, frustrated,” he said.
Wood said Mike – who constantly scribbles rap lyrics in notebooks – is a brilliant music student.
“It’s awesome, I get to sit and listen to this amazing stuff,” Wood said.
Mike laughed. “She’s lucky she gets to hear some of it. I tell people, if they want to hear me, buy tickets,” he said.
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
