School Scores ‘A’ in Art of Rehabilitation

STOCKHOLM —  Authorities didn’t call on the police to take care of Stockholm’s graffiti problem. They sent teen-age spray-paint artists to graffiti school.

Not only was there a sharp decline in graffiti, said teacher Lee Spangberg, but a lot of artistic talent was found among those who had been merely defacing walls.

Although money ran out and the school has closed, social workers involved in the project called it a good example of the way social offenders should be handled--with guidance and rehabilitation, not punishment.

Spangberg, 18, admits to having scrawled on some walls before he became a teacher at the school when it opened last March. He has a business card that says, “You Say It, I’ll Spray It.”

The project was set up in an empty high school in central Stockholm.

“As soon as we opened up, everybody knew about it,” Spangberg said. Spray-can wielders came in four weekdays after school for a few hours of “living out their aggressions,” believed to be the underlying reason people spray walls.

“We didn’t exactly stand at the blackboard and tell them how to sit down and the rest,” Spangberg said. “You would just throw down the spray cans on the floor and there’d be an explosion of activity.

“It was not the kind of school where guys came along with spray cans in their attache cases. The vandals came here.”

Fellow teacher Sven-Arne Hokenstrom put it this way: “The ones who came to us had a pain in their souls.”

Officials claim that graffiti dropped by more than 50% while the school operated. The national government even awarded the school a medal in October for reducing vandalism. But then the project’s $27,500-funding ran out and the group lost the lease on the building.

“Now they’re all out there again on the street,” Spangberg said of the youths.

Of 150 pupils, about a dozen had serious artistic ambitions and came for advice, Spangberg said. But youth centers seeking to decorate their walls with controlled graffiti began to call the school to hire young artists. Some people wanted their motorbikes or boats decorated. Some pupils found that they could get jobs painting that paid as much as $320.

Inger Wissen, a social worker who thought up the project and headed it, said the idea of a graffiti school was born in 1987, when a wave of vandalism led to public complaints for the police to crack down on the young offenders.

“According to insurance company statistics, scribblings went down by between 50% and 70%” after the school opened, Wissen said.

She added that she hoped authorities would grant the project more money so it could reopen.

Ragnar Backman, head of Stockholm’s Department for the Removal of Scribbling, said the city spent $406,000 to wash away names, political slogans and drawings in 1989.

Backman roams the city in a small van equipped with chemical cleansers. He said he feels no regret in removing graffiti, explaining, “Most of it is simply messy.”

In April, the graffiti students showed off their skills at an exhibition in a Stockholm gallery. In August, 50 spray-can artists went to a youth fair at Strangnas, outside Stockholm, where they painted for spectators.

“Police guarded them,” Spangberg said.

Now, the doors and windows of the graffiti school are bolted and barred. The building is deserted, its outside walls covered in graffiti left over from eight months of classes.

“What the authorities didn’t count on,” said Spangberg, “was that the guys would spray not only every single wall inside the school, but also everything outside it.”