Chalkboard and the directors of Ten Penny Players invited three teaching artists—a poet, a playwright, and a puppeteer—for a discussion about teaching in Austin H. MacCormick Island Academy, the alternative high school for adolescent men (16-18) who are incarcerated on Rikers Island in New York City. The discussion, moderated by Chalkboard’s Kate Wilson, took place at NYFA on July 31, 2001.

The participants speaking in the transcript below are:

Barbara Fisher, co-Director of Ten Penny Players and a printer, artist, and writer.
Dennis Nurkse, Brooklyn’s Poet Laureate, who works on Rikers through TPP.
Jenny Romaine, a member of Great Small Works (theater collective), who also teaches on Rikers through TPP.
Richard Spiegel, co-Director of Ten Penny Players, who is a poet and editor of Streams.
Candido Tirado, a playwright who works on Rikers through the Manhattan Theatre Club.

What do you find different about working as teaching artists on Rikers Island?

Barbara Fisher: When we’re in a prison, we’re as locked in as they are. Yes, we can leave; but we are in a prison. We’ve had artists who, after one or two times, said they couldn’t go back.

Jenny Romaine: The first thing you encounter at Rikers is a small wooden shed. You have to present sometimes one, sometimes two picture IDs. They check in "the Board of Ed Extended File #76 Island Academy" or whatever. The first time, we missed our classes completely—even though we had gotten there an hour early.

Once you go to clearance, you drive over the bridge and you park your car. Then you have to go through another series where you get another ID to get on a bus, and you get a stamp, in case there’s a lock down. But what if you get there when it’s time for shift change? That’s when they do their police thing, where they have to sign in. You’re screwed. The students are waiting for you. You say, "But we have to teach now!" "Sorry. Shift change."

So that’s how you get through. In order to get to Island Academy, you take this bus. The radio is blaring; people are talking and friendly; it’s kind of a nice scene. You get to Island Academy, and you have to go check in with the Correction Officers to get your next ID to enter the Academy. The whole process can take a really long time.

Dennis Nurkse: There is something specific in that in prison there is an abdication of control over one’s own body, and there is an abdication of living in the world of cause and effect, and as a teacher you experience that too. As an institution, it imposes standardization; but after it’s imposed standardization, it has to demonstrate power by abdicating its own standardization and being arbitrary. It has these two hallmarks: absolute determinism and absolute arbitrariness. I can go to the checkpoint and the guard can say, "Hi, Dennis. Don’t fill out the form today. Go in and bring me back a sandwich." I can go to the checkpoint the next day and the guard can say, "Never saw this guy before. Do you have form X-17?" What you have to do is abdicate your individuality. If they say, "Do you have form X-17?" you have to basically say, "I’ll wait here until you straighten it out. I have a good book."

Candido Tirado: It’s arbitrary until something happens inside the jail, like if somebody tried to escape the week before. There were some gang fights in the main population two weeks in a row. Every day we went in, the alarm went off, which meant we could not move. We have to stand by the guards. Many times I’m almost out of the main area, and they just lock us in. It can last minutes; it could last hours.

There was something worse that happened to me: I caused the lock down. I lost my ID card. You cannot move around Riker’s without an ID card. They give you these flimsy clip-on cards, and it fell on the floor. I got this chill: "Uh-oh. This is like death." The whole of Rikers couldn’t move.

Do you get used to the prison setting?

Candido: The first day was kind of hard, and the second day. Then after awhile you begin to notice that it’s a separate culture. It has its rules, its economics, its politics. You see a normalcy to it.

Richard Spiegel: At first it’s offensive, and it hurts to see how cruel people can be to each other. Cruelty is a fact of life in prison. After awhile you go back and back, and you wonder if it’s not affecting you. If your sense of outrage is not as strong as it was. Or your sense of fear.

Dennis: It’s sort of becoming an expert in vicarious suffering. We have to say that the arbitrariness that we talked about affecting the teachers affects the kids too. Your star kid may be peeling potatoes or doing laps, or if you’re in High Impact he may be digging a trench someplace instead of showing up for the workshop that you prepared for him, and that you know he really wants to take. You can’t count on him being there.

Jenny: In order to make puppets, we had to find everything that had no edge to it.

Barbara: For the work that Jenny does, some of what they work with could be contraband.

Jenny: Forget good scissors. No wire. No acetate: someone could make a fake ID and disappear. No plastic bags: flotation device. Count your markers, count your rags.

Dennis: No staples.

Barbara: Everything is returned back. You can’t just hand a kid a pencil or a pen; you’ve got make sure the kid gives it right back to you.

Richard: You’ve probably noticed, Jenny, that after awhile people recognize what you’re doing, and they become a little open about that.

Jenny: I didn’t mean to criticize the policy; I was just talking about experiencing it. In the Island Academy, you are reminded of where you are, because you’ll see a correction officer punch a kid: Bang! I’ve had the experience of thinking, "This is one of the nicest experiences I’ve had all year, because there are only ten kids in a class, and when kids finally get going they’re doing great work." Then you notice, "Wow, there’s an armed guard outside. No wonder they’re not acting. . . ." [Laughter.]

Barbara: One of the things that helps with Correctional Officers as well as teachers is our professional development session. In November, folks from Manhattan Theatre Club come to it; we bring as many teaching artists as are available; we bring the Island Academy teachers, the administrators, the para-professionals; and a few of the COs usually come. It gives us the chance to relate to each other outside of the prison setting. That helps when we have programs in the prison setting.

Candido: One of the important things is the contact person inside Island Academy. That could be a teacher, a para-, a principal, but it’s usually an assistant principal. We used to have one who would tell us before we got to the check point, "This person is in rare form," when the guard was up in arms.

Dennis: The hallmark of the institution is that it has moods. It’s such a standardized environment, but it’s not rational. It could be because of violence in the Middle East, or anything.

Are the students easily motivated?

Richard: One of the things Ten Penny Players tries to do is encourage everyone to write. We would take kids that were being disruptive, or getting tossed out of the class, or hiding under tables, or who had been truant since elementary school. We worked with kids who could not write, who would dictate their poetry to me. I typed out what they were writing, and handed them back a print-out, which they were intrigued by—that their words could be on a piece of paper. We also went into the classroom with copies of Streams, and the kids would want to write, because they saw their peers writing. They felt that Streams was a vehicle by which they could get their word and story outside the prison.

Dennis: It’s true about the genesis of Streams. For a person to write a poem that thousands of people are going to read because Richard and Barbara will publish it—there’s a power to that process.

Candido: The students sign up for my class. In my experience, in a regular high school, you go into a class of thirty-five kids, and if you’re lucky half want to do it, and then you have to cajole the other half of the kids to get moving. It’s been easier on Rikers. The hard part is that the kids have court dates, or they get pulled out; commissary might have been cancelled, so they might be up in arms.

Barbara: Or they’re released.

Candido: I was working with one who was going to read his play, and he was going to be let out. I said, "Don’t leave!" [Laughter.] There is a downside to the work. But motivation—I never had problems with that.

Jenny: When you come in and say you’re a puppeteer, what could be more queer? Usually we have to do a song and dance, razzle-dazzle showing fantastic videos. With us, the students have to be in the room. Sometimes kids sleep, some people are completely belligerent the whole time, like, "F—k you! No, I won’t do that!" And then one day they wake up and they’re like, "I wanna draw a tree." And then they’re the one who saves the day. While the kid who was the star player, you can’t count on being there.

Once we were dong a thing about their health curriculum. We had to connect it to math somehow, and create a public service announcement. My part was about food poisoning. One kid said, "My friend ate Lo Mein and got food poisoning." Another kid who had grown up in Chinatown knew everything about the interior of a Chinese restaurant. He’s there one day, tells us all this stuff, draws great pictures—and then we never saw him again. But no one forgot what his contribution was. It didn’t seem like such a train wreck to me.

Dennis: I would say a lot of kids are ferociously motivated. They’re poets, and they’re dedicated because they will test badly in every skill they’re tested in. There’s a certain "the first shall be last and the last shall be first" aspect to these workshops that’s very exciting. One kid had tested at kindergarten level, and I asked him to write a dialogue. Once he read that poem, all the other kids in the class said, "God, he’s a genius!" Which is not a common prison reaction. It’s empowering to that kid, but it’s also empowering to the others—prisoners don’t get to say, "My friend is a genius," either.

Richard: The attraction of poetry is that these kids had everything taken away from them, and all that they have left is their thoughts, their mind, and they can create poems in their minds.

Candido: I had a kid in my class, and he was about to be put in the main [adult] population, so he was acting out for days. He even challenged me, "Give me some candy!" I had candy, but I said no. I said, "Why don’t you sit down and write?" And he wrote this piece about how he got put in jail. He was angry at the guards, and called them names in the play, which is kind of dangerous. But the play was so good that no one was offended. The whole section called Sprungs goes to the chapel and hears the plays read by professional actors. That’s 200 kids, their peers, watching. You should see the faces of these kids when their plays are performed. They’re glowing. Sometimes they mouth the words.

Dennis: I try to work on the issue of fatherhood, because a lot of the kids are fathers. It’s an area of their life that they take very seriously, but feel that they’re failing at tremendously. A lot of them have a tremendous anger against their fathers.

Candido: Do you find that that young women are more volatile than the boys? I was teaching at Horizons, the facility in the Bronx. The guys were easy to work with, but the girls! I knew that the moment I walked in, the DNA changed in these girls. They had so much angst toward me for being a man. Sometimes they said very aggressive things that even the guys wouldn’t say, even in Rikers.

Barbara: Sometimes race, gender, or disability is necessary as a similarity between teacher and student, and sometimes it doesn’t matter at all.

Jenny: Puppeteering is already weird—so to them, I’m "the white weird lady." I think my freakiness gives me an edge. Sometimes I think it helps a little.

Richard: If you can find common meeting ground, race and gender and the differences—you can transcend them. If you’re coming out there thinking, "We’re going to indoctrinate you in our culture," they’re going to sense that.

Candido: I am Puerto Rican. I can relate to these kids. Also, I’m from the Bronx. Right there where Horizons is, that’s where my aunt used to live. I tell them, "Right there where you’re standing, we used to play stickball." Then they can relate to me. That connection really works, especially teaching with populations that are not so willing to give.

Dennis: Among 12 people, each one will feel different about what it means to be black. Some will not have any sense of having been victimized because they are black, and others will have a sense of tremendous historical injustice. They’re very sweet about it to me. There was this one kid who wrote a poem that went, "The white boy has us in a trick bag / The honkey has us in a trap." When he was going to read, he said, "Out of respect for our visiting poet, I’m going to change the words: ‘Giuliani has us in a trick bag / This administration has us in a trap.’"

Does teaching at Rikers influence your own art?

Candido: I was doing a workshop in drug prevention. This kid said, "Me and my friend, we needed money, so I started selling drugs with my best two friends." One of them gets jealous of the third one and kills him. I said, "You know, I want to write that." I wrote the play called Mama’s Boys. Kids really understand what the play is about. The tragedy is that it is so common.

Jenny: I don’t want to sensationalize the issue in my theater work, and talk about someone’s pain, and not do anything about it.

Because there are things that can be done about it. I guess the effect is that I want to be a part of civic discussion about public education.

Dennis: In terms of art, I think it’s all good for me. I hear artists talk about the isolation of poets in America. It doesn’t seem that way to me. These kids are writing poems, and they seem to me like genuine artifacts that will be remembered, so it helps me with the isolation of being an artist.

Richard: I spend a lot of time with Streams, the anthology. I see it as a work of art, my art to create this anthology. It does affect me about my musings about my own writing. I wonder about my place in all of this: what does it takes for me to go into a prison setting, and why does society need prisons?

Barbara: As artists we run the gamut. Some are apathetic; some are horrible. Some artists don’t value the kids because they’re in prison.

Richard: One of the ideas behind punishing people is that in punishing someone other people might identify and then won’t do that crime. They won’t go there. I think that what happens with artists is that they do "go there." They imagine—they go there with that human being. Imaginatively they don’t see someone who sets an example of what not to do, but they see the total human being. Artists will go where other people won’t go. And they will go into prison.

Jenny: I don’t know if I identify with an incarcerated person, but in a segregated society, in a place where we’re age differentiated, here we are working together. I think that’s interesting. Someone told me the statistic that one out of every three young men of color will end up incarcerated. If you think about that, don’t you think you should understand what that reality is? That’s one of the reasons I worked on Rikers.

Barbara: One of the important things about going into the prisons is that there is always the possibility that we will effect a change in somebody’s life. Sometimes we are the only thing that keeps these kids from losing themselves, and becoming the terrible people that many people think prisoners are. We prevent that, I think.

Candido: I have to say that what Barbara and Richard are doing is incredible work. When Richard was describing working with the kid who doesn’t want to work—that’s sainthood there. It takes tremendous energy and desire.

Dennis Nurkse, Jenny Romaine, and Candido Tirado have won NYFA fellowships in poetry, performance and emergent forms, and playwriting, respectively.

Ten Penny Players is a 34-year-old arts and education non-profit that includes the publishing/performance project Waterways.