Rikers High

Rikers High by Paul Volponi, published in 2010, was recast as a young adult novel after Volponi originally wrote a version intended for an adult audience. Relying on his experiences teaching in the juvenile wing of Rikers Island, a New York City jail, Volponi tells the story of a teen who is trapped in the justice system and must spend several months trapped in Rikers as a result. Using an amalgamation of real-life people to create his characters, Volponi presents a variety of characters whose fates are often grim. Though the novel doesn’t shy away from describing the despair inherent in the system, the author throws rays of potential and hope into the mix.

Seventeen-year-old Martin Stokes is a black teenager who lives with his loving mom in New York City. After an encounter with an undercover narcotics cop, Martin is arrested and locked up on Rikers Island. Even though both the prosecuting and defense attorneys agree that all Martin did was point out where the cop could buy weed in the neighborhood – an offense that should result in nothing more than probation for the teenager – they are having difficulty coordinating a court date in order to resolve the situation. As a result, five months after being arrested, Martin is still on Rikers, waiting.

Life on Rikers is hard, especially since Martin’s original placement is in an adult cellblock called Mod #3. There, he learns that there are two types of prisoners: herbs and thugs. As the names suggest, the thugs are in charge, and the herbs are there to do their bidding or else suffer the violent consequences. Martin does his best to keep his head down and attract no notice so that his clear herb status doesn’t put him into danger. At the same time, he tries to avoid the corrections officers whose abuse and debasement of the prisoners are near constant.



On a day, when he is transported to the courthouse for a postponed court date, Martin is chained to another prisoner who ends up in a fight. Caught in the middle, Martin is slashed across the face with an improvised weapon. The injury is quite serious, and Martin knows that now he will forever be marked with a jail scar. Nevertheless, one good thing comes out of this incident: Martin is transferred from the adult cell block to a juvenile area called Sprung 3. There, he can take classes towards his GED so that he eventually can get his high school diploma.

At first, Martin is worried that his face scar gives him away as an herb to the residents of Sprung 3, so he immediately tries to pick on someone weaker to make himself not seem like a pushover. However, his idea backfires because Jersey, the teen he tries to intimidate, is part of the posse of the de facto ruler of Sprung 3 – a tough young man named Brick. Part of Brick’s power comes from his access to a kind of black market commissary: in exchange for other prisoners doing his laundry or giving him money, he gives them permission to use the many contraband things he has collected.

Martin does well in the classes he takes at Rikers and connects with a teacher who seems to actually care about the kids. Still, there is a huge barrier between the kids and teachers, who live by such fundamentally different rules. When one teacher misplaces a small, metal chalk holder, the entire class is forced to undergo strip searches because this little piece of metal could be used as a weapon. After this humiliating ordeal, the chalk holder turns up in the teacher’s jacket pocket – and of course, nothing happens to the teacher as a result of the chaos that he has caused.



Martin observes the other boys around him. He is impressed by Ritz, the only white teen who is up for challenging Brick’s authority. However, he particularly bonds with his roommate, Sanchez, a model prisoner who has finished his GED and is soon going to be transferred to a prison upstate. Together, Martin and Sanchez concoct a scheme to stage a suicide attempt – each of the prisoners takes a turn on “suicide watch” and anyone who prevents a suicide gets $100. However, Sanchez has been suicidal because he fears the transfer; instead of sticking to the plan, he hangs himself for real. Martin is shocked to find his friend’s body suspended from a pipe in the bathroom.

As Martin adjusts to life inside Rikers, Brick tries to make a deal with him. If Martin agrees to take the fall for anything the corrections officers suspect Brick of doing, then Brick will protect Martin. It is a tempting offer, but, ultimately, Martin declines – he is unwilling to risk his future for Brick because he believes that he still actually has a future in front of him.

Eventually, Martin is finally released from jail with a sentence of a year’s probation. He leaves the jail with a diploma from the classes he took while there, and with the knowledge that now his life can start for real because he has a loving family and a home to come back to. The ending is bittersweet because we know how few of the teens Martin encountered behind bars can say the same.