For Rikers’s Most Troubled Inmates, Art Offers Hope

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Every weekday morning, Katie Hinson drives across the long bridge from the tip of Astoria, Queens, to the penitentiary on Rikers Island. She passes through three security checkpoints and heads to the women’s jail. Hinson is neither a correctional officer nor an administrator; she is among a handful of therapists who have dedicated themselves to helping Rikers inmates through making art.

For Hinson, each day consists of three to four one-hour group art therapy sessions with the inmates—or patients, as they’re referred to by the therapists. “When they know that I’m coming, they’re all seated in the dayroom,” Hinson told me when we met, along with the island’s art therapy supervisor Lesley Achitoff, in Astoria in June. “They’re all really invested, it’s kind of awesome,” Hinson continues. “I’ve started to take requests for music, which has been a great component. It’s something they’ve been able to choose, because they don’t otherwise have any choice for anything. I put on music and they come up and grab materials.”

Art therapy is optional for inmates in the mental observation units at Rikers. The materials on offer are generally limited to what the therapists call dry mediums: oil and chalk pastels, coloring pens and pencils, and materials for collage. “We don’t use loose materials,” says Achitoff. “We wouldn’t just put paint on the table with patients struggling with mental illness because it’s dis-regulating for them. It can trigger them in certain ways if they have a traumatic background.” Wet materials are more emotionally charged, explains Hinson, and their very nature as liquids makes them more prone to accidents. Patients will sometimes become overwhelmed if they do something wrong. “As a therapist,” she says, “you want to support their egos.”

Paint is also one of the materials more likely to end up as contraband. And when materials go missing, patients must undergo invasive strip searches. In an environment where choices, never mind opportunities for personal expression and creativity, are at a minimum, inmates could be tempted to smuggle paint out of the class in order to color their hair or nails, Hinson explains. She tells me about one patient who carved her Department Of Corrections (DOC)-issued soap bars into pocket sculptures of images and names, and drew life-size murals on the walls of her cell while in solitary confinement.

Scissors, tape, and stickers are banned. Instead, the therapists will often offer their patients pre-cutout magazine clippings to piece together as collages, invite them to craft cards and letters for friends and family, or print the outlines of round mandalas for the patients to color in. “There are studies that show that if you work within a circle, your heart rate goes down,” says Achitoff. “But they’re very preoccupied with going outside the line.” If the inmates do, “they think they have to tear it up, because they’re very hard on themselves. These are people who have made lifetimes of mistakes, in their eyes. And they don’t want to make any more. They’re their own harshest critics.”

Achitoff leads a team of 11 art therapists, Hinson included, who work under the auspices of the Mental Health program at Rikers. The program receives its funding not from the DOC but from New York City Health + Hospitals Corporation, a public benefit corporation. They are part of a growing contingent of therapists from various disciplines—art, dance and movement, and, soon, music and drama—who work at Rikers to provide support for the jail’s population of incarcerated adolescents and adults.

Most of the inmates on Rikers Island have been charged but not sentenced; others are serving sentences under one year. A majority of the inmates, say the two art therapists, are suffering some form of PTSD, and anxiety or depression. The jail itself has been plagued by bad press, most recently around a delayed effort to abolish solitary confinement for those 21 years old and under, and the suicide of 22-year-old Kalief Browder. (Browder killed himself after he was released following a three-year stay at Rikers, which began when he was 16; he spent about two of those years in solitary.) But common to all prisons and jails are structures that, according to Renee Obstfeld, an instructor in the Art Therapy programs at NYU and SVA, mirror the abusive conditions inmates likely experienced growing up. To meet growing demand, Achitoff’s team will expand to 18 by the end of the year.

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