Page 10 - 2016 MARCH issue

A New Kind of Freedom

Nature channel offers window to the world

for Coffee Creek inmates

by Jake Bartman

For inmates at Coffee Creek Correctional in 2010, the “Blue Room” was designed to help

Facility’s medium security prison in de-escalate charged situations in the facility’s

Wilsonville, a new television channel in the Intensive Management Unit, where inmates

facility — which screens images of waves spend all but 40 minutes per day in solitary

rolling in from the ocean, mountains flanked confinement.

by drifting clouds, the night sky and more The Blue Room was the first program of

— has gone a long way toward making incar- its kind in the country, and TIME Magazine

named it one of the “25 Best

Inventions of 2014.” When a situation

would become tense, prison guards

experimented with bringing inmates

to the Blue Room for an hour or so

to watch videos of different natural

settings instead of employing more

forceful tactics.

The program was so successful in

reducing incidents of misconduct that

Department of Corrections officials,

including Sustainability Coordinator

Chad Naugle, began to consider

implementing it at other facilities as

well.

Staff had the idea to broadcast

SPOKESMAN PHOTO: JAKE BARTMAN - Coffee Creek Correctional Facility inmate Lanelle nature imagery on a continuous basis,
Warner, shown here with the television in her two-bunk cell, says that some of the nature and sought a facility to try a pilot
images screened on a new channel broadcast throughout the facility bring her back to her program. When the DOC approached
childhood on a Native American reservation.

administrators at Coffee Creek, they

ceration more bearable. were met with a “really accepting” response,

“In here, our lives are mediocre,” said Naugle said.

inmate Karlyn Eklof, who has been impris- In April 2014, the prison introduced the

oned since 1995. Eklof is serving a life sentence channel to its mental health infirmary (MHI).

without the possibility of parole after a murder “It reduces stress and agitation,” Naugle said.

conviction, and said that the images broad- He said that it benefits prisoners by increasing

cast by the channel exposed her to things she quality of life and reducing suicide attempts

thought she might never see again. and incidents of self-harm, but also benefits

“The first couple times I saw (the channel), staff by making the correctional environment

it took my breath away,” Eklof said. safer for them.

The channel was modeled after a program Having received positive results in the MHI,

begun at Snake River Correctional Facility in the facility began to broadcast nature imagery

Malheur County, Ore. in 2013. Inspired by a throughout the prison’s television network in

TED talk given by ecologist Nalini Nadkarni February 2015. There are televisions in many of

10 Volume 2 Issue 8 - MARCH 2016