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 …

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How the War on Drugs Kept Black Men out of College

TAMARA GILKES BORR - MAY 15, 2019 - From The Atlantic The War on Drugs locked up thousands of black men, and a new study finds that it may have also locked many out of the college classroom—and all the benefits that come with a college degree. There was a time when black men’s college enrollment was …

One reason capital punishment should end:

https://eji.org/news/charles-ray-finch-exonerated-43-years-after-being-sentenced-to-death?fbclid=IwAR10mC65E1wnRBErnYCTM7f6Em0fCenipVixNJ5N_5Y2CZYSVQz-c2Mwzx8 Charles Ray Finch Exonerated 43 Years After He Was Sentenced to Death in North Carolina June 28, 2019Charles Ray Finch, now 81 years old, became the 166th person in the United States since 1973 to be exonerated after having been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death when the district attorney in Wilson County, North …

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 …