Jeane Mack - Every kid is savable at Washington County Juvenile Detention Center

Jeane Mack has a big heart for the youth who come her way, whether their roads to the Washington County Juvenile Detention Center where she is director are paved with bad luck, bad choices or bad living situations -- or, in most cases, a combination of all three.

"I used to feel bad when people asked me if I liked my job, because of what I do," she says with a smile. "I don't feel bad anymore. I love what I do. I actually believe that we're planting some kind of seeds here. I'm passionately driven to keep on."

She's got a big voice to match her big heart, but Mack says she was well into her 20s before she learned how to use it. An only child, she and her parents moved from state to state as her father -- a printer by trade -- followed the jobs.

"I say Fort Smith is home, because that's the longest I've ever lived anywhere," she says. "I was born in Texas -- but we only stayed there a year -- then moved to Louisiana, then Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware and then to Arkansas. It just happened that as the [lithography] industry progressed, my dad had better opportunities up north, and then someone had the foresight to bring it back south. I was glad, because we were southerners at heart."

Mack says she was "painfully shy" and, as an only child, had no built-in friends as she moved from state to state and school to school. She married young, had two children and, after a difficult divorce, headed to college with the intent of becoming a police officer.

"My senior year, I started coming out of my shell," she says. "I had a wonderful professor at West-ark, which is now the University of Arkansas in Fort Smith. I was the only female, and older than everybody else when I went to college. This professor said, 'Come on. You've got the opportunity to be a leader.' I was always kind of, OK, just go with the flow -- and now people can't believe I was ever shy."

Mack first set her sights on being a federal agent. She braved an excruciatingly strenuous and awkward interview process and even turned down an offer from the government when she found out the position would require frequent relocations, something she didn't want to put her own children through. Next, she explored the possibility of becoming the first female sheriff's deputy in the area.

"I went in to the sheriff's office," Mack remembers. "He had his feet up on the desk and said, 'What can I do for you, little missy?' I said, 'I would like to apply for the sheriff's office.' He took me down the hallway and showed me all of the pictures of the past sheriffs and said, 'Do you see any pretty little girls here?' and I said, 'No.' He said, 'I guess you want to ride a horse. Are you a dandy?' I said, 'No, sir, I've never really been around horses, but I would give it a try.' He said, 'Why don't you come back in a few years,' and it just went all over me."

No matter: Mack had already found the path she was to take. She just didn't know it yet. She had become an intern at the Sebastian County JDC, where she met the director, Melba Rogers.

"She said, 'What do you want to do? I guess sit and do your homework,'" remembers Mack. "I said, 'No, I want to go and talk to the kids.' She looked at me like I was crazy. She was rough and gruff. She said, 'All right, let's see how long you make it.' She put me in a room with five boys, and they told me their stories. I was like, 'Oh my God.'"

She was hooked.

After Mack had her infuriating conversation with the sheriff , she returned to her internship to tell Rogers the tale.

"She said, 'Have you not figured out where you should be? You belong with the kids,'" says Mack. I said, 'You're crazy.' But unbeknownst to me, she was mentoring me, with her gruff but grandmotherly touch. She knew before I did. And the rest, as they say, is history."

Rogers introduced Mack to Randall Everett, then the director of the Washington County JDC. He hired her as floor staff , but within six months, she had assumed the position of assistant director -- despite some initial reservations that the position might push her into a mostly administrative job.

"I said, 'Wait, I don't want to be a pencil-pusher, I want to work with the kids,'" says Mack. "And [Everett] said, 'Exactly, Jeane. You have a voice, and you need to use that voice for those kids.' That resonates with me to this day, and that was 28 years ago."

Incarceration

Everett retired seven years after Mack accepted the assistant director role, and Mack stepped into his shoes. She's seen a lot of changes in the JDC since then, starting with where it's located: At the beginning of her tenure, it was housed in a renovated apartment building on College Avenue in Fayetteville, near the old courthouse.

"We had three rooms, where we had nine kids," says Mack. "Back in the early 1980s, judges decided we had no real place to hold kids. It started out as a little group home for runaways, and then we realized we needed something a little more secure, so we attempted to make it as secure as possible."

The small facility grew crowded, and the makeshift security measures were far from ideal. A proposed sales tax increase measure to fund a new facility failed, but, almost immediately after, several kids escaped from the JDC and vandalized several houses. Funding suddenly became available, and the new center soon went in on Millsap Road. Eventually, the JDC moved to its present location on Clydesdale Drive in South Fayetteville. Juvenile court proceedings are held in the same building, making it easier -- and safer -- to transport the youth to court, since it's now an easy walk down a hallway and through a door.

True to her nature, Mack had to put her big voice to use before the larger, safer environment was provided.

"In 1997, I took over as director, and Judge [Stacey] Zimmerman was elected to be juvenile judge," she says. "Her first week on the bench, I walked into our 14-bed facility, and we had 30 kids in there. That puts me out of compliance, and I actually called the state to tell them that. They said, "Jeane, do you know what you're doing? That puts you out of compliance. You're going to lose funding.' I said, 'Someone has to do something,' because I'm all about getting everyone on board. We had a great Quorum Court at the time, and everyone listened to our concerns."

The current building has 36 beds, arranged in "pods" -- small, glass-fronted rooms positioned in a semi-circle that can be easily seen from a central, elevated area where JDC employees are stationed. One pod is specifically designated for youth charged as adults. The setup includes a nice classroom/gym space, used during the school year by Fayetteville Public School employees and year-round for physical activity. There is a small visitors' room, with glass separating small booths, and a sign on the door that instructs parents and guardians to refrain from delivering bad news to their children while they're at the JDC.

"They'll sometimes call them on the phone and say, 'Hey, Grandma died,' and then hang up, and we have to clean that situation up," Mack says, casting a weary eye at the sign.

Currently, the JDC is far from capacity: Out of 36 beds, the average daily population is somewhere between 15 and 20 youth. This is a result of a Washington County's participation in a Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative (JDAI) -- an effort to find alternatives to locking kids up for nonviolent, not felonious activity. Some 300 communities nationwide are currently utilizing JDAIs in an attempt to reduce juvenile criminal activity and identify the underlying causes of such behavior.

Key to this initiative is the Diversion Program.

"Thankfully, the people I've worked with throughout my career have had vision," says Mack. "One of the things that I saw was working in other states were diversion programs. So I introduced this to the court and gave them [statistics] from other states, and they just jumped on the bandwagon. We've created some great diversion programs. We were the first to do Hooked on Fishing."

This program -- part of the Washington County Outdoor Adventure Club and coordinated by JDC coach Jeff Courtway -- aims at offering an alternative focus to area youth who have had early brushes with the law. Kids participate in stream clean-ups and rafting and fishing trips, among other outdoor activities. Other local diversion programs include Teen Court -- in which juvenile offenders are tried by their peers -- and Creating Lasting Families Connections, a program that deals with family dynamics and how they can affect behavior. All diversion programs have one goal in mind: to stop criminal behavior before it has time to take root.

"I've been doing this long enough that I guess I've done the full circle," says Mack. "Be their friend, be their enemy, throw them in jail -- and now we're back to, 'We know we need to treat them like kids, because they are kids.' All of the statistics will tell you that the minute they walk through our door, their life changes for the worse. Forever."

In fact, a recent Justice Policy Institute report cited research that showed that youth detention can increase the chances of suicide or self-harm, detrimentally affect education, and even impede future earnings and ability to remain in the workplace.

"Most importantly, for a variety of reasons to be explored, there is credible and significant research that suggests that the experience of detention may make it more likely that youth will continue to engage in delinquent behavior, and that the detention experience may increase the odds that youth will recidivate, further compromising public safety," the report claims.

Perhaps most distressing of all, a 2015 American Journal of Preventive Medicine study found that a single arrest as a teen can lead to a 50 percent increase in risk of dying young.

Innovation

The Evening Reporting Center, located in The Station on Emma Avenue in Springdale, is another hard-fought-for weapon in the battle to avoid youth incarceration -- instead of being detained, teens are bused to the Evening Reporting Center after school to work with counselors and job trainers and experience a multitude of arts programming.

"Norma [Frisby] fought for that Evening Reporting Center because, being part of the JDAI, she and Judge Zimmerman visited other facilities that were doing this, and the key factor was always that they all had the Evening Reporting Center," notes Mack. "The key idea is to keep kids off the street during the after-school hours."

In addition to wholly embracing the principles of diversion, Mack has shown herself to be an innovative JDC director. She turned the small, muddy watering hole on the land where the JDC stands into a catfish-stocked fishing pond for use by the Hooked on Fishing program. She facilitated the planting of a garden on the grounds for the JDC youth to tend and harvest for the hungry in Northwest Arkansas. She started a therapy animal program. She utilizes the proximity of the University of Arkansas in order to hire social work and counseling interns to ensure that JDC youth receive ample mental health services. And, she says, when it comes to working with nonprofit organizations in the area who want to help the youth at the JDC, she'll "try just about anything at least once."

"She's good at partnering with not only folks from around the county but also with those [local] nonprofits who can bring education and insight," says Judge Joseph Woods.

Take the recently formed book club as an example.

"A couple of gentlemen from the university who love reading started it," says Mack. "The kids actually love it. They love it. They actually sit down and read a real book, not an electronic book. And we show the movie afterwards. That became a perk because they did so well with the book group. We thought it would be like pulling teeth, but no. 'East of Eden' was the first book they chose, and, shame on me, because even though I claim to be nonjudgmental, I was like, 'What?' And then "Moby Dick" was next. Those kids are all over it."

LaKisha Bradley is the executive director of the nonprofit My-T-By-Design: Painting with a Purpose. She's been working with the youth at the JDC for nearly two years now.

"She's been phenomenal in letting me work with the kids," says Bradley, who brings her "Conversate and Paint" workshop to the youth at the JDC. The process includes helping the residents to share their thoughts and feelings even as they are creating artwork. "I call it, 'Becoming a champion of your own sound' and 'Grow where you are planted' so that when you get out, you don't come back. I try to build a relationship and become a light [for] the youth, so that they can see their value and their worth, even through their mistakes. We all make mistakes -- the question is, 'How do you grow through that?'"

From the beginning, Bradley says, Mack was open to this creative process of connecting with the JDC residents.

"She's a leader, an automatic leader -- I would also say, an innovator," says Bradley. "When you think about the Juvenile Detention Center, she's always looking at innovative and creative ways to connect with those residents, to help them make positive change."

Candy Clark first became acquainted with Mack when she was a member of the Washington County Quorum Court. She has since become a supporter of the diversion programs, specifically, the summer program that aims to keep at-risk youth out of trouble when school is out.

"The summer program is wonderful," says Clark. "She takes the crew out, and they have an active two weeks to do all kinds of things they would not have the chance to do otherwise -- horse riding, zip lining. And when I say 'kids' I'm talking gang members from different gangs. Yet there are no flare-ups. They learn to get along together."

"We just finished our summer program," says Mack. "The thing that stood out to me was that we did not have to corral behaviors like we have in the past. The kids were well-mannered. And we're talking about some hard-core kids. I attribute that solely to the staff that work with them at the Evening Reporting Center. It was the best week ever. They could just be kids."

Though it's been nearly 30 years since she found her path, Mack shows no signs of slowing down. It's not uncommon to see signs of burnout in a person who has worked with at-risk youth for nearly three decades, but Mack seems as hopeful and determined about the job she's doing now as you might imagine she did when she accepted her first staff position.

"She sees those kids as totally savable," says Clark. "They're anything but throwaway kids to her."

Challenges over the years continue to shift -- such as changes to the structure of Medicaid that have created barriers to appropriate healthcare funding for those in the juvenile offender system -- but Mack's goals have stayed the same.

"Her whole goal is to break cycles and empower them to make better decisions, inspire them to dream and hope," says Judge Woods. "That's why she does what she does and why she lights up when she sees them turn for the better."

"We all work together as a team, and hope the kids walk away with something positive from here," Mack says. "I always tell my new staff, 'I know that everybody remembers a particular person in their lives. It could be a positive or negative memory. I challenge you that when every kid leaves here, they remember something positive about the negative experience they had.'"

NAN Profiles on 07/22/2018