Transforming youth detention with the Sanctuary model: What we can learn from Colorado Division of Youth Services

This is a personal account from Sanctuary Program Director, Cameron Burgess.

It’s a funny thing, the memories that fade and the ones that stick with us the most. The memory that remains with you after you’ve returned from an overseas trip is often not the memory you would expect.

Earlier this year I spent time in Colorado. Yes, the Rocky Mountains are breathtaking! I went full emersion, driving up to Bear Lake, soundtracked by John Denver. I grappled with how to capture the beauty of these imposing mountains on camera. I decided I couldn’t and committed them to memory instead. They are nothing short of striking.

However, the most striking moment – and the one memory that remains with me, is of a young boy sitting on a park bench. He wouldn’t have been more than 14. Slender, shoulders slumped, he was sitting with an adult, deep in discussion. The park bench he was sitting at was surrounded by 17-foot-high walls with wire. Security cameras were everywhere. He was in youth detention talking to a detention centre worker and awaiting his day in court. His prospects of returning to his family anytime soon were dim. “He’s doing his daily S.E.L.F”, the Divisional Director informed me. SELF is a tool from the Sanctuary model that invites people to reflect on what is making them feel unsafe. The participant names the accompanying emotion, expresses the losses they’ve experienced and bravely considers what they want from the future.

This young person had this same conversation every day with a trusted adult. Sometimes about the small things that were bothering him, sometimes about the whole unwieldy, overwhelming circumstances he found himself in after one rash decision.

This memory has remained with me because it gave me hope. Where I expected to find detention workers reinforced with protective vests and pepper spray, at arm’s length from young people, I found them sitting in the sunshine, in casual clothes, engaging deeply in sense-making of the present, and daring to think about a different future.

For the last ten years the Colorado Division of Youth Services has worked to implement the Sanctuary model, a workplace culture-change program that teaches people to cope more effectively with adversity and stress and aims to prevent trauma symptoms. The Sanctuary model helps to create a shift of perspective from “what’s wrong with you?” to “what’s happened to you?”.

Australia’s youth detention system is stained with stories and images of violence, solitary confinement, and narratives of tough responses to young offenders. We’ve not wandered too far from our penal colony DNA when it comes to thinking about how to keep Australia safe. Without claiming that the Colorado Division of Youth Services have all the answers, over the last 10 years they have wrestled deeply with the question of how to understand the trauma young offenders have experienced. They have explored how to give them every opportunity to heal while existing within the 17-foot-high walls of Colorado’s youth detention centres.

Talking to senior bureaucrats, directors, staff and young people in Colorado’s Youth Detention Centre I heard the same story. In a system that equates safety with cells, tasers, and solitary confinement, Sanctuary has helped cultivate safety for staff and young people through leaning into relationships and finding the hurting human within the young offender. It looks like staff reaching for insight into behaviour before reaching for a baton. It sounds like those charged with the responsibility of running the system acknowledging that a punitive approach fails to create safety for staff and only increases the likelihood of a young person reoffending. In the words of Divisional Director, Anders Jacobson “Sanctuary has sucked the correctional feel out while still providing safety”.

The sceptics out there may comment that this sounds too soft, that young offenders need tough love. But the evidence shows that what Colorado Division of Youth Services is doing is working, and far better than other approaches. Seclusion rates – the amount of time a young person in detention is kept isolated - averages at 5 – 9 hours per year in the US. In Colorado detention centres this ranges between 28 – 32 minutes, if used at all. In Australia, children can still be subject to solitary confinement despite the UN urging Australia to prohibit this outdated practice for children (Mackay, 2023).

Colorado has nearly halved the number of youths who reoffended within a year of leaving youth detention, to the lowest level in nearly a decade. These results saw the Colorado Division of Youth Services awarded with the National Commission on Correctional Health Care Excellence Award in 2022.

It takes a lot to dislodge the Rocky Mountains as the one dominant memory from a trip to Colorado, but the state’s work in youth detention did just that. They’re taking brave but calculated risks in the name of keeping staff safe, and helping young people heal from trauma. They’re using the Sanctuary model as the compelling ‘why’ that drives their decisions.

They’ve left me thinking that maybe the most beautiful aspect of Colorado isn’t found in the snowcapped mountains, but in the most unlikely of places - within the walls of youth detention.

References

G Tobin, P Begley, (2022). The hidden report that spells out the dismal failures of youth detention policy in Australia. ABC www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-15/buried-report-on-youth-detention-raising-the-age/101635706

Mackay A. (2023). Preventing torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of children in detention in Australia. Alternative Law Journal, 48(2), 90-96. https://doi.org/10.1177/1037969X231157811