On a Tuesday evening, the Robert N. Davoren Complex Chapel at New York City’s Rikers Island echoed with the roaring laughter of adolescence. A dozen Black and Hispanic young men, all under 21, outfitted in gray and tan, stood in a circle on the chapel’s chancel with their improv instructors. One instructor explained warm-up rules to the young men: “I’ll send you one snap, and you accept with two snaps. Then you send it to another person with one snap. Get it?” They nodded.
As they got into it, still more laughter swirled as some missed one snap with two — two with one. The more they settled into the snaps, the more they loosened up. When they got a bit too comfortable and increasingly exuberant, one of the young men, with a booming voice, settled the room when the director's attempts fell on busy ears: “One mic, one mic, one mic!” The room settled. He’d done it before, it seemed.
By night's end, the group had performed eight rounds of improv on the theme of vacationing — a fitting composition of escapism. At the close of their performance, each received a certificate of completion and a letter for their next court appearance explaining their participation in the arts program.
The 12 men are members of Drama Club, a group founded in 2013 that, since its inception, has worked with current and former court-involved and incarcerated youth through improv. The program is in five facilities across the city: Rikers, Crossroads Juvenile Center in Brooklyn, Horizon Juvenile Center in The Bronx, and Passages Academy in Brooklyn and The Bronx, where Drama Club teachers are immersed in English language classes with adjudicated youths bused from citywide group homes. Drama Club offers this demographic an artistic outlet, the opportunity to express themselves and have fun in a punitive place. But it’s also been found to have benefits beyond the obvious ones.
“There is some very validating evidence proving that improv can help mitigate trauma for young people,” Josie Whittlesey, the nonprofit’s founder, said. “I've seen it happen over and over again in our classrooms. The practice of ‘Yes, And’ can create a great sense of safety ... and can make brain function more integrated. I believe this is also why we've been told anecdotally that our program reduces violence with our participants.”
A trained actor, Whittlesey is no stranger to the art world and has long advocated using art as therapy to rehabilitate incarcerated people. In 2011, she began teaching theater to men at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Ossining, New York. Her team was invited to bring the program to Rikers two years later.
Rikers has made headlines for decades as a notorious correctional facility, with investigations of inhumane conditions, inadequate healthcare, overcrowding, violence, and sexual abuse. One of its most high-profile cases was that of Kalief Browder, a 16-year-old who spent three years — including almost 800 days in solitary confinement — awaiting trial for a minor offense. It drew national attention and highlighted issues with pretrial detention and the treatment of minors at the facility. Browder died by suicide two years after his release. Shortly before he died, the city prohibited solitary confinement for people under 21.
With such compounded issues that have led to multiple lawsuits and calls for reform, Rikers continues to face heightened scrutiny and a potential seizure by an outside authority. Should the takeover, or receivership, happen, it could leave the restorative art program's fate at the troubled jail complex uncertain.
Rikers covers 40% of the costs to run Drama Club in its facility, according to Whittlesey; the rest, she said, is made up of grants and private donations. On average, it costs roughly $4,000 a month to teach at Rikers. Amid the uncertain future of the jail, Mayor Eric Adams's administration also cut $17 million from the program budget at the facility — but Drama Club remains, and has even grown in popularity. Whittlesey said Rikers recently requested the group double its hours, increasing the number of young people able to participate each three-month period.
Whittlesey is optimistic Drama Club will survive future cuts and any impending overhaul.
“Our program is quite popular with young people and staff alike and offers a reprieve from the harsh realities of jail for everyone involved,” she said. During a recent class, Whittlesey asked some young men how they felt about the potential receivership. “They all shrugged,” she said. “One of them said, ‘It doesn't really change our reality at all. We're still here either way.’ At this point, no one knows if the receivership is going to happen, when it will take effect, and which aspect of operations it'll take control of. But it needs to be pointed out that there are hundreds of young people on the Island right now, with very limited programming.”
But programming like Drama Club may be key in reducing one of the most significant challenges the U.S. criminal justice system faces: high recidivism rates. According to the most recent Bureau of Justice statistics on formerly detained people released from prison in 2012, 71% were arrested again within five years (this number is around 81% for people under 24), perpetuating a cycle of crime and incarceration. Initiatives like Drama Club have shown promise in breaking this cycle.
According to research in the Journal of Correctional Education, incarcerated people who participated in an art rehabilitation program were more likely to continue to attain further education while in prison. A RAND Corporation meta-analysis published in 2013 found that incarcerated people who engage in education were 43% less likely to reoffend upon release than those who do not participate. These findings underline the significant impact arts education can have on reducing recidivism rates among detainees. Another survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics last year revealed that people in prisons typically have a 10th-grade education. Advocates of prison arts believe it holds the potential to counteract systemic marginalization by providing avenues for improving socio-economic prospects upon reintegration into society.
“Many people enter prison already carrying past trauma and having had too few opportunities and resources,” Marc Howard, PhD, the founder and director of criminal justice organizations Frederick Douglass Project for Justice and the Georgetown University Prisons and Justice Initiative respectively, said. “And prison is, by design, dehumanizing. Education and arts programs restore a little bit of that feeling of humanity. No single program can undo the physical and psychological violence of prison, but it can help free a person’s mind and restore a sense of self.”
Since August 2014, Whittlesey and her team have made their way to the 91-year-old correctional facility on Saturdays. The teaching artists do improv with them in two sessions in two different units from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., all in preparation for a finale show for corrections staff, invited family, and selected guests at the end of their 12 weeks. “The one thing I’ve noticed about Drama Club is the impact,” Lindsey Lybrand, Rikers’ executive director of advancement and enrichment, said. “Juveniles come out of their shells…And that’s rare to see in here.”
“You can see the transformation in some of them,” she added, “in how they develop over time. Some of them return each [quarter]. They love it. They bond.”
On the Tuesday visit to the group’s finale performance, one performer, Duran Vazquez, who had graduated that day from Riker’s GED program, told me about his experience with Drama Club.
“It’s been growth,” the 19-year-old said. “It’s helped me to be more expressive — like how to have a conversation and be more comfortable and get out my comfort zone. When we here, you get to know the different side of people…I like it cause I wanted to do something different. Every day was the same. So this, I look forward to it.”
As he and his public defender await trial on an murder charge from January, Vazquez’s experience with improv demonstrates the potential positive effects of art initiatives many researchers have pointed to for rehabilitating imprisoned minors.
“Outside, there's so much procrastination,” Vazquez admitted, “so much distraction, so much just going on that you can’t focus. In here, it’s like, this is it. In here, I’m more focused. It’s taken time away from my life, so it’s helped me focus on the future more. If I’m not putting my all, what’s the point?”
According to Howard, there’s a good reason that arts education can help improve the lives of at-risk youth.
“In part, that’s due to the skills, credentials, and connections that people build along their educational journey,” Howard said. He championed the Pivot and Prison Scholars programs for former and current incarcerated people, respectively. “Another critical piece is that educational and artistic programs allow incarcerated people to see themselves as more than ‘inmates’ and thereby to reach for a different future than they may have previously been able to imagine.”
Justin Dodson, Ph.D., L.P.C, founder of Navigating Courage Counseling & Consultation and Youth Villages’ former assistant director of clinical services — organizations that cater to youth emotional development — agreed, saying such initiatives like Drama Club aid in critical cognitive development in minors and can be used in psychotherapy, particularly for youth who lack safe spaces for self-expression and guidance. He said this technique helps them learn new coping mechanisms and allows them to envision a specific place that creates a sense of grounding, safety, and well-being.
“Studies have indicated … a 30% reduction in discipline among inmates due to inmates learning how to manage feelings,” Dodson said. “Usual feelings of anger or aggression are now channeled by focusing on the task of art…When implemented, these programs can increase an inmate's self-esteem, offer a positive perspective of identity, and empower inmates to practice healthy life skills.”
One of Drama Club's efforts to cultivate such skills in the young adults they work with is to reengage with them upon their release. That’s why Whittlesey and her team don’t only conduct outreach at correctional facilities but also champion alums to return as instructors and mentors. Like Tiffany Cruz, who, in 2015, at 17 years old, joined Drama Club while at Rikers. After seeing a flier for it in the halls, “I was like, ‘Alright, let me sign up, you know, to get my mind away from what was happening.’” Today, Cruz is one of the program’s teaching artists.
“I'm able to talk to people more,” Cruz said about the confidence she gained from the program. “I'm a little bit more friendly than what I used to be. I'm able to be more social, and that has [a lot] to do with the improv… I've been sticking with [teaching] because I know what it was to be in there. You just want to see that familiar face and always wanting to know that somebody's checking up on you … I want to be that familiar face for everybody else.”
The success of Drama Club is not an isolated case. Across the country, other such initiatives have been implemented in correctional facilities, highlighting their importance in the rehabilitation process. Organizations like Rehabilitation Through the Arts have played similarly pivotal roles in utilizing visual arts, music, theater, dance, and writing to empower inmates and boost positive behavior change and personal development. Whittlesey said from her immersion in the space, many of the other programs she’s heard about at other facilities nationally tend to stick to traditional forms of artistic expression, unlike Drama Club, which uses improv intentionally as an avenue to restore confidence and dignity.
Given the cyclical challenges the criminal justice system faces, where recidivism rates loom large and rehabilitation is a pressing concern, initiatives like Drama Club offer a flicker of hope.
“Every choice leads to consequences,” Vazquez said about one of his takeaways from being in Drama Club and how he hopes one day it’d help him run a cybersecurity business. “There’s a reason for every choice you make… I was in the middle of not making good choices in life and that’s how I got caught up. Like, you got to set yourself up for good or else you gon fail.”
