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There are no shades of grey with Paul Volponi, young adult author of Rikers, Black and White and his latest book, Rooftop. Volponi worked for several years with incarcerated adolescents on Rikers Island, and he continues to work with at-risk adolescents in a variety of capacities. Volponi writes the stories as he has come to understand them: through the eyes and experiences of young adolescents struggling to make it in the heart of New York. To hear Paul tell it is like hearing it straight from the kids themselves. Gut-wrenching, brutally honest, and so a matter-of-fact are Volponi's characters, that an educator can't help but hope that every person interested in the future of young adults reads his thought-provoking testimony to the very real existence of inequity within the criminal justice system.
The following interview was conducted through email during August of 2006.
TAR: In your novel Black and White, and your latest novel Rooftop, you examine discrimination and the racial inequities of the criminal justice system. How did you become interested in the topic?
PV: I grew up several blocks from Rikers Island, and as I wandered the streets with a basketball in my hands, many cars pulled up to ask, "Hey, kid, How do I get to Rikers Island?" (It's on a difficult avenue to find). That happened to most people in my neighborhood, so much so, that we already knew what the people were going to ask before the words left their mouth. So I thought up a smart-mouth response that had my friends howling- How do you get to Rikers Island? Rob a bank!
But when I looked into the eyes of the people asking, how they were lost, and had to admit to a stranger that they were going to visit somebody they loved in jail, I could never pull the trigger on that punch line, I also began to notice how everyone asking was either Black or Hispanic. Many years later, I took a job teaching on Rikers, mostly because it was one of the few teaching jobs open, and so close to my house. That's when the past and the present sort of blended together for me, and I formally began my jail education-a very interesting look into...