Blas Garza introduced our speaker, Gary Delanoeye. Gary has over 25 years of experience as a special education teacher and co-ed high school vice principal at the Juvenile Correctional Facility. As a consequence of his experience, he has authored two books: “Checking In At The Crowbar Hotel” and “Letters From The Outs”. His two books explore the culture of incarcerated juveniles. His latest literary work is an anthology, “Clean Shorts” to be published by the end of March.
He is also a college professor with 20 years of experience in teacher education and Masters’ Courses at California Lutheran University and, locally in Santa Barbara, at Antioch University. He has bade more than 30 presentations at educational conferences including two to Rotary Clubs. In his spare time, he is a volunteer with the National Parks Service and is currently teaching natural history courses. He will also be making his debut at the Center Stage Theatre’s “Personal Stories” on April 8th and 10th.
Gary shared with the group some excerpts from his books, a fictionalized rendering of the experiences he had during his 25-plus years as an educator in juvenile corrections. He spoke about a “culture of creativity” within the institution that he found quite remarkable. He described how individuals found several ‘alternative’ uses for certain items that those outside of the correctional system may not have considered before.
The first example was for chicken bones. Inside the walls of the correctional facility young people would use chicken bones to make weapons (including darts, blowgun projectiles, and even incorporating them into other weapons such as extending the tines on a fork), art (including religious artwork, like a cross or a Star of David), and wearable decorations (such as in hair, or on one’s shoes). Speaking of shoes, the youth would also find ways to express themselves in the way that they laced their shoes. As an example, young women might lace them backward so that the bow was down by the toe of the shoe. Some would also iron and starch their shoelaces, or dye them with whatever substance they could obtain that would create a color or stain. There are quite a few fashion trends that have become popular in the overall culture, yet may have first been popularized in the correctional system. These include: saggy pants, ‘distressed’ jeans, ironing creases into pants and shirts, and certain hair braiding styles.
Another example included bibles. Due to the thin nature of the paper, youth would use them as rolling paper to make cigarettes, also using bulk tobacco they were able to smuggle into the facility. Others would hollow out bibles to use as storage containers to hide things such as packs of cigarettes or weapons. With fruit, they would try to make fermented beverages, however due to their youth and inexperience there were varied levels of success in these endeavors, and as many might wind up sick as actually got ‘high’.
One interesting invention involved paint. Due to the size of the facility, there were many times that there was painting being done on the interior. One creative young man figured out that he could take the skin that would be formed on the top of the paint (at that time, the paint was leaded), and over a period of a couple of years, managed to create an 8-pound ‘paintball’!
Yet another story involved a few individuals who were quite intrepid in their quest to obtain the prescription drugs they had been abusing prior to their institutionalization and used two medical reference texts, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and The Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR), which are commonly used by psychiatrists. These young people would use the PDR to look up a specific medication that they were interested in, which would also have a description of the medical conditions for which those medications were prescribed. They would then look up the medical condition in the DSM, which would list the symptoms associated with those conditions. They would then act out those symptoms in order to be diagnosed with the condition that then allowed them to be prescribed their desired medications.
His favorite story is about two 19-year-old bikers, who usually lived “by their wits” on the road but would actually plan to get incarcerated every so often (usually after doing the ‘dine and dash’) to get ‘cleaned up’ and get medical care, and related quite a ‘colorful’ story about one such episode.
