Caged

A Teacher’s Journey Through Rikers, or How I Beheaded the Minotaur

BRANDON DEAN LAMSON

192 pages

9781531502515, Hardback, $27.95 (HC), £23.99

Simultaneous electronic edition available

MARCH

New York City & Regional | Education | Race & Ethnic Studies

General Interest

“Notorious enough to be nicknamed Torture Island, Rikers Island, home to one of the world’s largest correctional and mental institutions, has been the subject of our culture’s collective fascination for decades. I guarantee after you read Brandon Dean Lamson’s memoir Caged: A Teacher’s Journey Through Rikers, or How I Beheaded the Minotaur, you will never see that facility, nor prison education, kink, mindfulness, Richard Wright, or shame in quite the same way. On Rikers, as Lamson writes, ‘There were multiple literacies, various grids laid over the prisoners’ words and their worlds.’ This book guides us through those hybrid, polylingual, even nonverbal languages with an ethnographer’s eye and the rawness of reportage—from gang slang to institutional speech and literary allusion—always implicating the narrator in the narration, so that we are made complicit in the realization that prison education itself is a form of control and how solitary confinement is a kind of panopticon in reverse. As the men around him wrestle demons, Lamson stares down his own minotaur by confronting the violence in his own past with an unflinching poet’s heart that transforms trauma into beauty and fear into forgiveness. Caged is a potent lyrical reminder of the daily work that remains for each of us to do.”

—DR. RAVI SHANKAR, PUSHCART PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR OF CORRECTIONAL

An honest and gripping memoir of one man’s life-altering experience teaching at Rikers Island.

When Brandon Dean Lamson first accepted the teaching position at Horizon Academy, a courtmandated academic program for eighteen- to twenty-year-old prisoners at Rikers Island, even he had to question his own motivation. Why was he risking his life every day at a prison notorious for being one of the most dangerous places to work? Was it his small way of making amends for the blatant and pervasive racism he witnessed every day growing up in his small Southern town? Or was it to prove he wasn’t afraid to go where his own father, a prominent District Court judge, had sent both the innocent and guilty alike? In Caged, Lamson provides an intimate view of his transformative experience teaching inmate students on Rikers Island.

Rikers Island resonates as a place of horrific violence and inescapable punishment, one of the last places in America that truly invoke overwhelming, universal fear. Set in the late 1990s—a time when the city was rapidly changing into an increasingly corporatized and policed space—Caged exposes a criminal justice system designed to thwart efforts to rehabilitate and educate the incarcerated. Lamson’s first-hand account illustrates how penitentiaries too often use prison education as another means of control.

Written in a gripping, confessional narrative, Caged explores the consequential impact of Lamson’s move to New York City, his childhood experiences with racial justice, and his journey working in four prisons over the course of three years. Lamson provides glimpses into his own self-destructive behavior as parallels emerge between his life on Rikers and his personal life, his white privilege, and how his behavior progressively entraps him in ways that resonate with the challenges faced by his students. The book intimately captures how incarceration changes both prisoner and educator alike as Lamson struggles to integrate into life outside prison after his departure from Horizon Academy.

BRANDON DEAN LAMSON teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of two poetry books, Houston Gothic (LaMunde Press, 2008) and Starship Tahiti (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and Prairie Schooner, and he was recently the Summer Poet in Residence at the University of Mississippi.