All Day: A Year of Love and Survival Teaching Incarcerated Kids

All Day chronicles Liza Jessie Peterson's experience teaching at Rikers Island, New York City's main jail complex. As a teaching artist and poet, Peterson documents her year working with incarcerated youth in a GED program. The narrative follows Peterson's daily interactions with her students, revealing the realities of education within the criminal justice system. She details the institutional barriers, security protocols, and bureaucratic challenges that impact both teachers and students at Rikers. Peterson draws from her extensive background in social justice and arts education to connect with her students through poetry, literature, and honest dialogue. Through their classroom exchanges, she portrays the complex dynamics between teachers, corrections officers, and young people navigating the juvenile justice system. The memoir examines broader themes of race, inequality, and the school-to-prison pipeline in America's criminal justice system. Peterson's account raises questions about education, rehabilitation, and the true cost of mass incarceration on youth.

Readers highlight Peterson's raw honesty and firsthand perspective working with incarcerated youth. Many note her ability to humanize the students while exposing systemic inequities in education and juvenile justice. Likes: - Authentic voice and use of vernacular - Balance of humor with serious subject matter - Detailed portraits of individual students - Clear explanations of how the school-to-prison pipeline operates Dislikes: - Some found the writing style informal or unfocused - A few readers wanted more concrete solutions proposed - Several mentioned difficulty following the timeline Ratings: Goodreads: 4.3/5 (400+ ratings) Amazon: 4.7/5 (100+ ratings) Notable reader comments: "Pulls no punches about the realities these kids face" - Goodreads reviewer "Her poetry background shines through in the vivid language" - Amazon reviewer "Made me rethink everything I assumed about juvenile detention" - Library Thing reviewer

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🔷 Author Liza Jessie Peterson spent nearly 20 years working with incarcerated youth at Rikers Island before writing this memoir about her year teaching there in 2015. 🔷 As a spoken word poet and actress, Peterson first entered Rikers Island in 1998 to perform a play, which led to her long-term involvement with teaching and mentoring incarcerated youth. 🔷 Rikers Island, where the book is set, is one of the world's largest correctional institutions, with nearly 10,000 inmates housed there on any given day, and about 85% are pretrial detainees who haven't been convicted. 🔷 The book's title "All Day" comes from prison slang - when someone asks "How much time you got?" the response "all day" means a sentence of one year or more. 🔷 Beyond teaching, Peterson has performed her one-woman show about the school-to-prison pipeline, "The Peculiar Patriot," in over 35 penitentiaries across America.