Why Should Delaware Care?
Yoga is often associated with high-end studios and expensive wellness retreats. But Charlene Sams has quietly spent years bringing the practice to one of Delaware’s most vulnerable populations. Since 2013, her program, which serves kids in the criminal justice system, has demonstrated that yoga can be a powerful source of healing, emotional regulation, and stability for underserved communities.
As the heavy doors at the Ferris School for Boys lock behind her, Charlene Sams settles onto the carpeted floor of a small library tucked inside the juvenile detention center.
The dim fluorescent lights hum overhead. One by one, teenage boys join Sams. They lower themselves onto yoga mats and match her slow breaths, as the space — usually filled with the tension from locked doors, strict schedules, and constant supervision — falls unexpectedly calm.
She begins by asking the boys how they feel. They fire off their answers — “tired,” “good,” “optimistic.” Sams then rings a Tibetan bell, its soft chime cutting through chatter and inviting the room to settle.
Then she tells them to close their eyes.
For the next hour, the focus turns away from the circumstances that brought the boys to Ferris, which sits just west of the Wilmington city limits. They are guided by Sams through breathing exercises, stretches and meditation, encouraging them to pay attention to their bodies and thoughts rather than the pressures waiting outside the room.
The class is part of a mandatory program within New Castle County’s juvenile detention system that Sams has quietly built over the last decade. It has reached hundreds of youth and her classes have also expanded into other nearby women’s correctional facilities, healthcare and recovery treatment centers.
Drawing on both her professional training and her own experience with incarceration, Sams uses yoga as a vehicle to help young people process trauma and build emotional regulation skills they will be able to use for the rest of their lives.
She is the first Black woman to implement such a program in Delaware.
A personal transformation through yoga
Sams never imagined her career would lead behind the walls of detention centers.
In 2009, she was simply looking for a better stretch after long walks when she bought a yoga DVD from Best Buy.
At the time, she was navigating what she described as a “dead-end marriage,” while relying on medication each winter to manage seasonal affective disorder. After starting yoga, Sams was able to stop taking her medication.
“After a few weeks, I was like, ‘I feel different,'” Sams said. “I felt emotionally better, more stable, more calm.”
Not long after, she enrolled in classes and started to earn her yoga teacher certification in 2010.
The more she practiced, the more she noticed something else about the environments she was in. Most studios lacked people of color and were often expensive, Sams said. The people she felt could benefit most from yoga weren’t in the room.
“I wanted to go to halfway houses and re-entry places, actually all the communities that I had been touched by in some kind of way,” Sams said.
Those communities weren’t abstract to her. Born in Wilmington and raised in Newark, Sams became a mother while still young. Her own mother struggled with addiction. And in her early 20s, Sams spent 30 days incarcerated for a suspended driver’s license.
The sentence was short, but afterward she was evicted from her home and began to experience claustrophobia. She was left with almost no programming to help her process what had happened before or after her release, she said.
Those experiences shaped her perspective of yoga to not just be about fitness, but as a tool people in crisis rarely have access to.
“These populations are suffering with trauma, essentially. But nobody tells us how to deal with the trauma,” she said.
A mention of a dream
Sams began teaching at upscale gyms and studios around northern Delaware, earning between $25 and $50 per class.
But during that time, she was underemployed. And the classes she offered still didn’t fulfill the mission that had drawn her to yoga in the first place.
Sams started calling rehabilitation centers, correctional facilities, and reentry organizations, offering to teach classes for free. But they weren’t interested.
“At that time, I think there was just no education or even no real desire to want to know what yoga was,” she said.
Then, during her yoga teacher training in 2011, she casually mentioned her dream of bringing yoga into prisons and detention centers.
Someone else in the room was listening.
Chandlee Kuhn, then Delaware’s chief Family Court judge, approached Sams afterward. Ferris School for Boys was preparing to launch a yoga program, and Kuhn wondered whether she’d be willing to teach the classes.
Kuhn, who created the yoga program at Ferris, told Spotlight that it was “the best thing I’ve done in my whole career.” She wanted to bring the program to Delaware after seeing the transformative impact yoga was having in criminal justice systems in other states.
A 2023 study from the International Journal of Yoga Therapy on yoga in prisons and correctional facilities found that yoga can help incarcerated youth lower their stress levels after just one session, and concluded that the practice can support rehabilitation by helping young people build self-regulation skills and the ability to manage emotions and reactions.
Kuhn also believed it offered something many incarcerated youth had rarely experienced: consistent support from a trusted adult.
“We know that individuals in the justice system have suffered traumas,” she said. “Oftentimes those traumas come from early on, from people’s circumstances in their life where people haven’t shown up for them in a consistent and positive role modeling way.”
When the program first launched at Ferris, Kuhn said many staff members were skeptical. She recalled one employee even mocking the boys for participating in yoga. But as the classes continued, attitudes shifted.
“The kids really responded very quickly, and as you’ve seen with [Sams], there’s just a real buy-in,” Kuhn said.
Sams began teaching yoga at Ferris in 2012, initially without pay. But Kuhn secured small grants so Sams could continue leading the classes.
The classes spread to the New Castle County Detention Center, and the youth residential cottages, including Grace Cottage, Snowden Cottage and Molds Cottage, where youth preparing to reenter the community could continue the practice.
Still, funding remained uncertain.
But in 2013, Kuhn and Sams landed a meeting with administrators from across Delaware’s youth detention centers to discuss a potential contract. During the meeting, the superintendent at Ferris shared a story of a teenage boy who had been placed on suicide watch. He had become withdrawn and unresponsive.
After participating in Sams’ yoga class, the boy began engaging with staff again. According to Sams, staff said the change was significant enough that he was removed from suicide watch.
The heartfelt story prompted other higher-ups at the detention center to buy into the program, making it permanent.
“They were like, ‘We’ll sign. We’re ready,'” Sams recalled.
Understanding trauma
Today, the boys at Ferris and youth at the other detention centers experience a 10-week yoga program that Sams has built using both her own experiences and knowledge she learned from a training she and Kuhn attended at the Prison Yoga Project — a global nonprofit that specializes in trauma-informed practices for incarcerated populations.
The classes go beyond poses and breathing exercises, with the goal of helping young people understand how trauma shapes the body’s response to stress, and to recognize those reactions before they spiral.
“We begin to connect the dots to how we respond on our yoga mat, and how we can respond in life,” Sams said.
Creating a sense of safety comes first, Sams said. Students are spread throughout the room so no one is standing behind them. They are encouraged to notice their surroundings before closing their eyes.
Over the first several weeks, they learn how stress affects the nervous system, how to recognize physical signs of anger or anxiety, and how deep breathing can interrupt those responses before they escalate.
Harry, a 17-year-old, said those breathing techniques have become one of the biggest takeaways from the class. Set to leave Ferris in August, he hopes to finish high school, find a job, and eventually become a pipe fitter.
“Mind control,” Harry said, describing what yoga has taught him.
“I take the breathing exercises, and I use them very often outside of when Miss Charlene’s here. Like when I’m angry and stuff, breathing helped me a lot,” he said.
At the end of the program, Harry and the other youth will receive a certificate for completing the yoga course.
Sabrina Ellerbe, program manager at Ferris, says she views yoga as one of the most important programs at the school.
“That’s why we made it mandatory, right? It’s not optional; you have to take yoga,” she said.
‘What are you really doing?’
Today, Sams’ work extends beyond Ferris.
Around the time the detention centers’ yoga program became permanent, she founded POSH Yoga, which stands for ‘Principles of Strength and Healing.’ She has worked with other correctional facilities like Baylor Correctional Facility, Brandywine Counseling, the Stevenson House Detention Center in Milford, Kumba, and Amerihealth Caritas.
Beyond teaching children, Sams also trains juvenile probation and parole staff in yoga-based self-care and mentors other yoga instructors in trauma-informed practices.
Sams said she only works with organizations that are willing to cover the cost so participants never have to pay.
Despite the success of the programs, Sams has learned not to measure her achievement by the number of students she reaches.
For her, the hardest years came in 2015 and 2016 when Wilmington was drawing national attention for its youth homicide rate. During that time, she said, nearly 20 former students were killed after leaving detention — some only months after completing her class.
One young man, whom she had taught across multiple stints in the system, told her during his final session earlier that he expected to return to the same environment that led to his arrest, telling her that he had no role models.
He died not long after his release, she said.
“I started feeling like I’m not making a difference,” she said. “Like, ‘What are you really doing?'”
Sams said those losses changed how she thought about the program. She no longer frames yoga as a solution for everyone, she said, but as one option among several that a young person can choose to use or not.
“It came to me that if it’s only one [person] that has a response, that gets something out of the class, my job is done,” she said.
Sams dreams of one day creating a residential school for young people leaving detention who have nowhere stable to return. It would be a program that would combine education, yoga and structured support. Although she hasn’t secured funding or set a timeline, the vision remains.
A tool for life
Back in the library at Ferris, the session is coming to an end. The boys slowly return to their seated positions as Sams asks the same question she posed an hour earlier: “How do you feel?”
This time, the answers come more slowly.
“Relaxed,” one boy said. Others echoed the sentiment.
Moments later, the class is over. The yoga mats are rolled up, chairs returned to their places, and the boys file back through the hallway to go to their next activity.
Sams gathers her things and heads for the exit. She has three weeks left with this cohort. She knows she won’t see where every boy ends up.
Some will return to Ferris. Some will move on. Most, she says, she’ll never hear from again.
But that uncertainty doesn’t bother her. Her job isn’t to control what happens next. It’s to give them tools they can carry with them when they leave.
