Education Behind Bars:
Part II of a Series
Rikers High: A Filmmaker’s
View of Prison Education
By Gillian Granoff
“Making documentaries puts me in the enviable position
of being able to explore the world and be in places where you
wouldn’t ordinarily be; that’s the gift they give
to you.”
Among the winning documentaries at the Tribeca Film Festival
this year was Rikers High a transformative story of the lives
of young men going to school in prison. The film produced and
directed by Victor Buhler, paints with striking realism and
raw honesty a portrait of three inmates who attend the Austin
MacCormack Island Academy at Rikers Island.
The Austin MacCormack Island Academy is a school that is accredited
by the New York City Department of Education and offers its
2000 students, classes towards a high school diploma (GED),
courses in poetry, art, test preparation and life skills. The
school system is a virtual island unto itself, where teachers,
guards and social workers are the only flickers of inspiration
and hope amid the dark, barren walls of the prison. The
school has its own barbershop where inmates learn to cut hair
and practice their skill on other students. The vocational
skills they receive will hopefully translate while the prisoners
learn vital skills needed to help them relate to their peers
without violence. The boys sleep in close quarters with others
with only a cot and a small cabinet to store their things.
The film was produced
by Victor Buhler, Jean-Michel Dissard, and Bonnie Strauss
and co-produced by Althea Wasow. Victor Buhler, who conceptualized
the project, is a 33-year-old seasoned documentary filmmaker
and serves as both director and producer on the film. Buhler
cultivated a love for filmmaking and a desire to capture
the stories of adolescents at risk on film while an undergraduate
at Harvard. A native of England, Victor says, his love and
admiration for his mother, a retired special education teacher,
influenced his calling. He produced his first film while
still a Harvard student. In the film, he documents the lives
of adolescents in a residential treatment center over the
course of 6 months. The film’s content and style
bare striking similarities to Rikers High. Buhler says that
he wanted to get involved with a volunteer project, teaching
film to students, to get involved in the real world. “I
was hoping to volunteer my time teaching film to students in
school.” During his research, Buhler came upon a listing
for the “Island Academy” on the Board of Education’s
website. “I got in touch with the school principal.” What
he uncovered was a school behind bars, located securely within
the walls of Rikers Island, a maximum-security prison.
With his curiosity
and interest piqued, Buhler set out to gain access to the
prison facilities. He visited and began talking with students
in the Academy. For a year he visited prisoners without a
camera, getting to know the prisoners on a personal level
and familiarizing himself with their routines. It was Buhler’s
persistence, determination and commitment to make the film
that finally paid off two years later, when he successfully
received permission to bring cameras within the walls of
the school. Despite being $30,000 in debt, he persevered
and won the support of Showtime Networks as producer of the
film.
Rikers High, the 9O-minute documentary, examines the lives
of three students in the Academy.
The first is William Santiago, an eighteen-year-old aspiring
rapper with a history of petty crime and gang involvement.
He has not spent more than four months out of prison since
he was twelve and is back again for armed robbery, after holding
up a woman with a cigarette lighter shaped like a gun. Teachers
at Rikers High struggle to help him channel his sharp thinking
skills and gift for rap into his schoolwork, to no avail. He
is released from Rikers without a diploma and returns to the
news that his girlfriend is pregnant. In the final scenes,
we see him struggle to fill out a job application with very
little skills and education.
The
second character, Andre Blandon, is about to turn nineteen
and serving time for setting his aunt’s car on fire
to claim the insurance. He has a history of intense depression
and running away from home. His struggle to cope with a domineering
father is compounded by news he receives while in prison
that his younger brother is following the same path. The
news seems to overshadow his success at the Academy where
he has acquired his GED and is cultivating his natural talent
as a cartoonist. He dreams of creating his own comic books
while he is transferred to an adult faculty to serve out
the remainder of his sentence
Shawn Johnson, the Valedictorian of Rikers High, is the great
hope of the Academy. He is serving time for robbery. Soft spoken,
brilliant, and embarrassed by being considered a coward, he
reacts to the rejection of classmates by robbing two groups
of teenagers at gunpoint. At the Academy he flourishes academically
and uses his gift for poetry and for self-expression to inspire
others to reach their true potential. Shawn delivers a touching,
articulate valedictorian speech at graduation, to the roaring
applause of his peers.
The film opens with
a teacher and student in the academy in a discussion of Mary
Shelly’s Frankenstein. The
teacher encourages the student and the viewers to see the parallels
between the perceptions of Frankenstein as a monster and how
society demonizes criminals. He encourages Rodriguez to recognize
the anger it evokes in himself.
As we watch the stories
of these young men unfold, and see them released, we can’t help but root for them and hope
they can break the cycle of incarceration. The film’s
strength is in its incredible access, and its ability to transport
its audience into the scene. You really feel like you’re
there, but Buhler urges us not to make the mistake of thinking
that viewing the prison and being in prison are the same. This
access is not simply a result of the proximity of the camera,
but a result of intimate and open relationships between the
director and the students. Buhler describes that his success
in earning their trust was a delicate balance of listening
and watching. “I think something different happens when
you go repeatedly. Every time they would pose for the camera
I would deliberately not film them. The more we got to know
each other the more we got to the heart of the subject. Time
has a huge way of breaking down walls.”
Buhler’s stylistic choice of keeping the film and its
subject in the present tense adds to its impact. “I’ve
always wanted to make films that show things in the present,
as they are happening. I’ve always felt that narration
in a film takes you away from the present tense. My aesthetic
is to take the filmmaker out of the equation as much as possible.
I was aiming to film things to relate to what that person was
going through at that time.”
The absence of scripts
and contrivance challenge the viewer to interpret and react
to events in the film from his/her own point of view. Rikers
High is an inspiring example of how films can break down
stereotypes, motivate viewers and show how teachers and students
are striving to make a difference in people’s
lives.
Buhler states that “the
ability of documentaries to change perceptions and raise
awareness is what he finds most rewarding about the profession.
I hope that people ask questions, formulate their own opinions
and get involved. I wanted the film to leave the viewer asking
questions, simply because the answers are wide ranging.”
Buhler transforms the criminals from threatening, Frankenstein, into
human beings with their own struggles of conscience, dimension
and depth. The lines and boundaries begin to dissolve. By graduation,
the viewer becomes so immersed in the celebration, that it
becomes easy to forget these graduates are in prison,
“I’ve seen
a lot of films about jail that portray the inmates as animalistic
and disturbing to interact with. I think the aggressive personalities
that many inmates adopt are survival mechanisms for them
in jail and on the street. I was determined not to be scared
of them.”
“The Answer to
the Riddle”
Victor does not offer
easy answers to what he refers to as the “riddle” of recidivism, other than to raise
awareness to the flawed nature of the prison culture. “Spending
more time there, I feel very hopeless about the future of these
kids. I do not know the answer to this riddle. Society at large
does not provide any kind of opportunities or outlets. It’s
very easy for these guys to go back to jail. When they leave,
they have a criminal record. The enticement to sell drugs and
continue with their old life is overpowering and is really
a societal issue. It is illuminating and disheartening.”
From his mother Diana
Griffin-Strauss, a former special education teacher, Buhler
inherited an innate respect for teachers and an implicit
understanding of the frustration of having a talented student
who squanders his potential. After making the film, Buhler
is left with no simple answers on how to solve the cycle
of incarceration and recidivism. The U.S imprisons a fifth
of the world’s prisoners, and 8 out of 10 are rearrested
within a year, although they do not necessarily return to prison.
With such a high rate of recidivism, Victor Buhler acknowledges
it’s easy to be hopeless about the possibility of imagining
a better life for these prisoners through rehabilitation. “Certainly
these guys do commit crimes; however, our fetish with building
prisons has a short term gain but creates a larger problem
when these guys go to prison and make no real contribution
to society.”#
Rikers High debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival and will
air at Showtime networks and France 2. It is a stunning example
of how filmmaking can generate dialogue on a significant
policy issue.
