In the Building

This is a chapter from my memoir about teaching incarcerated high school students on Rikers Island in NYC that was published in the literary magazine, J Journal. The memoir is titled The New Plantation: Lessons from Rikers Island (published in 2019 by Deerbrook Editions): https://www.jjournal.org/post/in-the-building In the Sprungs, I had grown completely comfortable with my …

Advertisement

THIS IS NOT JUSTICE

A Philadelphia teenager and the empty promise of the Sixth Amendment By Jake Tapper https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/11/campaign-to-free-incarcerated-philadelphia-teenager-sixth-amendment/671527/ Painting by Fulton Leroy Washington (MR WASH). Source: Malike Sidibe for The Atlantic. OCTOBER 12, 2022 This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.  …

Maine prison debate team beats MIT in historic competition

Courts and Crime Maine Public | By Susan Sharon Published October 20, 2022 at 5:44 PM EDT From left: Anita Volpe, Tatyana Tomlinson, Victoria Scott, Daniel Porter, Chandler Dugal and Shaun Libby from the Maine Department of Corrections debate team. Last week, with little fanfare, a historic, livestreamed debate took place. On one side: a pre-law student, …

A conversation with author Jason Trask (with David Daniel)

Back in December as part of our Literary Lowell series, we profiled local author David Daniel, author of the Alex Rasmussen detective series and a number of other books. Now it’s David’s turn to contribute a new author profile to the blog. He recently caught up with Jason Trask who now lives in Maine but who spent …

Students Learn from the People They Love

I'm not a huge fan of David Brooks, but sometimes he gets it right. This is one of those times: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/learning-emotion-education.html?ref=oembed

The New Plantation

The New Plantation: Lessons from Rikers Island is a memoir about my experiences as a teacher of 16 to 18 year old incarcerated males in a public high school on Rikers Island, one of the largest penal colonies in the world. It will be published by Deerbrook Editions in June of 2019. This blog deals with the …

Incarceration in America

I spent three years teaching young men between the ages of 16 and 18 in a public high school run by the New York City Department of Education on Rikers Island, one of the world's largest penal colonies. Because Rikers is a jail, all of my students were awaiting trial. Most of them had been …