PeaceLove participants engaging during a workshop.
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Creating Community In Franklin County Jails The PeaceLove program focuses on expressive art workshops and community connections for incarcerated LGBTQ+ males. By Kaylee Duff
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n November of last year, a new LGBTspecific program was launched in the Franklin County jail system — but the inspiration for it has been around even longer. Franklin County’s corrections division has been running an award-winning program called Pathways for a few years. Pathways focuses on women, and a part of that programming includes PeaceLove, an expressive art workshop where participants can learn to express themselves and further understand the way they think and feel. Chief Deputy Penny Perry-Balonier (Franklin County Sheriff’s Office, Corrections Division) and Michael Daniels (Director of Justice Policy and Programs, Franklin County Board 20 | FEBRUARY 2019
of Commissioners) had been looking for a way to bring LGBT-specific programming into the jails, to accommodate a growing need for community. After researching and discovering there were no other LGBT-specific programs in jails nationwide, Deputy Tresalyn Butler proposed adapting the PeaceLove program for those needs. “When we started discussing looking for something LGBT-specific, in terms of programming for the folks in our facility, it was difficult,” Deputy Butler explained. Most programs formatted for the justice system involve different types of therapy, such as therapy for substance abuse or behavioral therapy, and weren’t LGBT-focused. “Finding something for justice-involved people that are LGBT was pretty much impossible.”
After seeing the success PeaceLove and other expressive arts programs had elsewhere, they decided to move forward and implement it to serve LGBT-identified males in the Franklin County jail system. “We thought it was a great idea to run it as a pilot program and see what the feedback is,” Chief Perry-Balonier said. “So far, we’ve had a lot of great, positive feedback on it.” PeaceLove was initially launched in Rhode Island by OSU alum Jeff Sparr, as a communitybased expressive arts program. It functions similarly to art therapy, focused on using art as a way to open up, express and learn more about yourself, but without actual therapy occurring or therapists facilitating. Originally meant to cope with mental health issues, it was adapted by the Corrections Division as a TRUE Q MAGAZINE
