Caged

Caged

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

$27.95

Publication Date: 28th March 2023

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 court-mandated academic... Read More
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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 court-mandated academic... Read More
Description

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 court-mandated 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.

Details
  • Price: $27.95
  • Pages: 192
  • Carton Quantity: 36
  • Publisher: Fordham University Press
  • Imprint: Empire State Editions
  • Publication Date: 28th March 2023
  • Trim Size: 6 x 9 in
  • ISBN: 9781531502515
  • Format: Hardcover
  • BISACs:
    BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
    SOCIAL SCIENCE / Race & Ethnic Relations
    EDUCATION / Urban
Reviews
As if unconsciously riffing on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s idea that all members of a society are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” Brandon Lamson finds himself haunted in ways that echo the confinement of his prisoner students at Rikers Island. Between the lines of this searing exploration of how class, color and sexual torsion twists men into being lurks a pervasive and persuasive suggestion that prisons are as contagious as viruses, that the conditions built in brick and stone for one section of a society migrate as if airborne. Lamson’s brave and gripping confessions in Caged trace how, in King’s words: “Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” Possibly counterintuitive in a culture that shouts about experience as a privately owned property, as if walking around the back of the mirror—the fairest indeed—we call self-interest, Caged whispers that the real conditions of the world are shared no matter what.---Ed Pavlić, author of Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners
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 non-verbal 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’s 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
Author Bio
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.
Table of Contents

Part I: Falling
The Weapons Board | 3
Killer Inside | 5
Island Bound | 12
Brujo | 18
Horizon | 21
Queen of Cups | 24
Stray Cats | 27
Burning | 30
Antigone | 34
Hellfire Club | 38
The Seagull | 41
Apollo Kids | 44

Part II: The Labyrinth
The Minotaur | 49
The Sweet Science | 51
Demon Weed | 54
Windows | 63
Maximum | 66
Solitary | 71
Red, White, and Blue | 75
Native Son | 79
Knockdown | 82
Mistress Evil | 84
Paris and Birdlegs | 88
The Duck Game | 92

Part III: Submerged
Devil Mountain | 97
Island Holidays | 103
Redpath | 109
The Cove | 112
Pink Leaves | 118
Strong and White | 121
Yard Blues | 124
Lost Dalí | 127
Hoops | 132
The Voice | 137
Do-Over | 142
Atlantis | 145

Epilogue | 151
Acknowledgments | 155

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 court-mandated 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.

  • Price: $27.95
  • Pages: 192
  • Carton Quantity: 36
  • Publisher: Fordham University Press
  • Imprint: Empire State Editions
  • Publication Date: 28th March 2023
  • Trim Size: 6 x 9 in
  • ISBN: 9781531502515
  • Format: Hardcover
  • BISACs:
    BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
    SOCIAL SCIENCE / Race & Ethnic Relations
    EDUCATION / Urban
As if unconsciously riffing on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s idea that all members of a society are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” Brandon Lamson finds himself haunted in ways that echo the confinement of his prisoner students at Rikers Island. Between the lines of this searing exploration of how class, color and sexual torsion twists men into being lurks a pervasive and persuasive suggestion that prisons are as contagious as viruses, that the conditions built in brick and stone for one section of a society migrate as if airborne. Lamson’s brave and gripping confessions in Caged trace how, in King’s words: “Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” Possibly counterintuitive in a culture that shouts about experience as a privately owned property, as if walking around the back of the mirror—the fairest indeed—we call self-interest, Caged whispers that the real conditions of the world are shared no matter what.---Ed Pavlić, author of Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners
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 non-verbal 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’s 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
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.

Part I: Falling
The Weapons Board | 3
Killer Inside | 5
Island Bound | 12
Brujo | 18
Horizon | 21
Queen of Cups | 24
Stray Cats | 27
Burning | 30
Antigone | 34
Hellfire Club | 38
The Seagull | 41
Apollo Kids | 44

Part II: The Labyrinth
The Minotaur | 49
The Sweet Science | 51
Demon Weed | 54
Windows | 63
Maximum | 66
Solitary | 71
Red, White, and Blue | 75
Native Son | 79
Knockdown | 82
Mistress Evil | 84
Paris and Birdlegs | 88
The Duck Game | 92

Part III: Submerged
Devil Mountain | 97
Island Holidays | 103
Redpath | 109
The Cove | 112
Pink Leaves | 118
Strong and White | 121
Yard Blues | 124
Lost Dalí | 127
Hoops | 132
The Voice | 137
Do-Over | 142
Atlantis | 145

Epilogue | 151
Acknowledgments | 155