Platte Valley Youth Services Center is one of 11 detention and commitment centers in Colorado for youths 10 to 20 years old.
Located next to the Weld County Jail, the golden brick-clad building looks like a modern school from the entrance, with student art in the front hall. But a tall chain-link fence surrounds the building, and visitors must pass through a metal detector to enter.
Platte Valley usually houses about 120 youths who are segregated by gender. The average length of stay in detention is 11 days. Juveniles who are committed (sentenced) stay an average of six months.
All students can attend school and work toward a diploma or GED. Committed residents can apply to work in the culinary program, and they receive anger-management training, substance-abuse treatment, life-skills education and other therapies.
Because some of the Platte Valley Youth Services center students are minors, The Denver Post agreed not to use their full names or show their faces.
Many will be here for Thanksgiving. The kitchen crew — paid staff and students — have been planning and preparing the turkey lunch for the past two weeks.
In a place that makes visitors think twice about the relative luxury of their own lives, these student-inmates are privileged to be working in the mess hall with food services manager Gary Lambert and culinary arts instructor Joni Hunter.GREELEY — The turkeys are thawed, the pie crusts rolled out, the potatoes ready for peeling.
This is a kitchen like any other, preparing for a Thanksgiving like any other. Except for a few key differences: The knives are locked behind a glass cabinet. The doors can clang shut at a moment’s notice. Guards lurk in the doorways, two-way radios (but no guns) at the ready.
The head chef throws around words like “garde manger,” and “mise en place.” The workers answer, “Yes, sir!” in the military-style common in haute cuisine.
But this place is more military than haute.
Lunch hour begins with a countdown. Male students dressed in green hospital scrubs file in, hands behind their backs, each counting out loud his place in line.
Some look so young, and some so hard. Some look you in the eye, others slant their gaze toward the floor.
In unison, they greet the lunch crew:
Thank you, ladies!
The three female students working the 7 a.m.-noon shift respond in kind:
You’re welcome, gentlemen!
“What would you like?” a 17-year-old with striking blue eyes asks the first boy in the lunch line.
“Sloppy Joe, please,” says the kid, who looks like a seventh- grader.
A second kitchen student, a 16-year-old vegetarian whose smile crinkles her freckled cheeks, carefully dollops a scoop of smoky-spicy meat onto a hamburger bun. Third on the line, Shaquaisha, 18, fills styrofoam cups with chicken-rice and potato-ham soup.
These girls applied for and were accepted into a 14-step culinary program in which they can earn education credits. Students who complete the entire course receive a chef’s jacket embroidered with their name when they graduate.
Food services manager Gary Lambert and culinary arts instructor Joni Hunter are teachers, bosses and more.
“We’re mentors,” says Hunter, who has worked in this kitchen since the detention center opened 11 years ago. “They don’t get yelled at here. They’ve had enough of that. We focus on being fair, firm and honest. And consistent.”
Lambert cares deeply about his work — the food and the kids. “We’re basically mother and father,” he says of their roles in the lives of their 16 male and female kitchen helpers. Like the rest of the detention center, the shifts are segregated.
Good morning, sir!
Tall, smiling science teacher Tom Grant stops in for a sloppy Joe. “They’ve got the best spices,” he says.
Spices? In institutional food?
“We teach ‘seasoning to perfection,’ ” says Lambert, his inner chef emerging. “They might think a little spice is good, so a lot will be better. No, it’s not.”
The center adheres to federal school-lunch guidelines and uses standard prison system- wide recipes. “People think of prison food,” says Lambert, making a face. “But all they have is these three meals and a snack, so it better be good.”
Modeled on Panera Bread’s “You Pick Two” choice of sandwiches, soups and salads, the menu “offers,” rather than “serves,” giving the residents a chance to make a healthful choice, building on the center’s behavioral goals. But unlike Panera, where customers sit on comfy chairs and sofas, diners here perch on round black stools at round black tables, all bolted to the beige and purple tile floor.
May I have a spork, please, sir?
As part of a green initiative, the kitchen recently switched from flimsy, throwaway “sporks” to heavy duty bright orange plasticware that can be washed and reused. The neon color makes them hard to hide, say the guards, who count out the spoons and forks coming and going.
But just because it’s jail, the food doesn’t have to look like it. Lunch is served on paper- lined reusable green plastic baskets. “We try to make the food look good because people eat with their eyes too,” says Lambert.
A college-educated chef who once carved ice sculptures for fancy hotels, Lambert found his calling when he started cooking in the prison system.
“There are so many battered and abused women here. I can be nice as pie, and they’ll say, ‘Why you being so nice to me, Mr. Lambert?’ Well, why wouldn’t I be? That’s how people are supposed to treat each other.”
This will be Lambert’s fifth Thanksgiving at Platte Valley, and he knows the holidays can be tough on kids who can’t go home. “It can be very challenging, the whole holiday thing, and it’s amplified here. To them, it’s a big deal, so they’ll get the whole schmear.”
The “whole schmear” includes 10 turkeys, mashed potatoes, gravy, dressing, green bean casserole and pumpkin (and maybe sweet potato) pies.
Although feeding 120 people is no problem for Lambert, he’ll have plenty of help.
“Do we mind working on Thanksgiving?” says Shaquaisha. “I think all the kitchen kids are going to,” answers her 16-year-old co-worker. “A lot of people find comfort in food.”
Enjoy your meals, gentlemen!
After all are served, the girls sit down to lunch and reminisce about holidays at home. “My family eats lamb for Thanksgiving and lasagna for Christmas,” says the 16-year-old vegetarian, who plans to go to law school when she gets out.
“I look Anglo but I’m Mexican,” explains the blue-eyed 17-year-old who served sandwiches on the lunch line. “We have enchiladas and mole and menudo and turkey with red chile.”
Both Hunter and Lambert survey the group with a look you often see on the faces of parents of teens: pride, apprehension, hope.
“There are days when I can’t believe I get paid for what I do,” Hunter says. Like a teacher, she decorated the kitchen bulletin board with orange and brown construction paper and asked the students to write about their passions on turkeys cut out in the shape of hands. “I am grateful for my givings,” reads one.
“I am intelligent.”
“I love music.”
“I write poetry.”
“I can cook.”
After cooking, serving and cleaning, the morning crew changes out of white shirts and aprons back into scrubs. Hunter “wands” them with a metal detector to make sure nothing unauthorized sneaks out, and the girls return to their mauve-painted cells, each with a narrow cot, high- up slit windows and a fluorescent ceiling fixture.
“As much as I love my job, I still have to remember where I work,” says Hunter, gesturing to the rolling doors that can drop down and seal off the kitchen in case of a “code red” fight or other emergency.
“You have to know your boundaries,” agrees Lambert, “For me, this is sacred. If there is a chance to change one of them — if I can save one, one by one — and turn them away from the life (where) they were headed, maybe my maker will say, ‘You changed a life.’ ”
Kristen Browning-Blas: 303-954-1440 or kbrowning@denverpost.com.
