Caged: A Teacher’s Journey Through Rikers, or How I Beheaded the Minotaur by Brandon Dean Lamson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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In Caged, Brandon Dean Lamson tells the story of his time teaching inmates on Rikers Island, finding himself in conflict both with students and with the guards. There is definitely a unique culture to the world of incarceration. I found myself thinking about the Stanford Prison Experiments in which ordinary people were randomly assigned to play either inmate or guard. The subjects’ behavior changed during the short period of the experiment, guards becoming more domineering and sadistic and inmates becoming more scheming and duplicitous than these people were in their regular lives. One sees evidence of this strange power dynamic and the resulting unusual behavior throughout the book. Lamson and the other teachers and staff involved with the school often saw the guards as vicious fascists, but – at the same time — they couldn’t trust the prisoners because learning was never an inmate’s top priority but rather was a combination of survival and maintenance of status.

As interesting as the story inside the wire is, it’s equally fascinating to learn what happens with Lamson outside his workday. The author is forthright about changes in his own psychology as he developed a need to work out his own violent tendencies as well as uncharacteristic sexual behavior. Lamson describes time spent in a boxing gym and S&M dungeon in service of these changes.

The book also offers some insight into what teaching methods worked or didn’t. Some of this pedagogical insight might be exclusively applicable to jails and prisons, but some would likely be of use to regular teachers, particularly in dealing with troubled or challenging kids. Lamson is also forthright about his own teaching missteps and failures, while offering the reader insight to what he learned from those teachers who seemed to be unusually effective.

I found this to be a fascinating book. It’s well-written and thought-provoking. I’d highly recommend it for readers of nonfiction.


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