ALL DAY is normally a behind-the-bars, personal glance into the problem of mass incarceration via an unstable, insightful and ultimately hopeful representation on teaching teens while they await sentencing.

Told with identical parts natural honesty and unbridled compassion, ALL DAY LONG recounts a year in Liza Jessie Peterson’s class at Island Academy, the high school for inmates detained at NY City’s Rikers Island. A poet and actress who had done occasional workshops on the correctional facility, about All Day: A Calendar year of Appreciate and Success Teaching Incarcerated Children at Rikers Isle Peterson was ill-prepared to get a full-time stint teaching in the GED program for the incarcerated youths. For the first time faced with complete days teaching the rambunctious, hyper, and fragile adolescent inmates, ‘Ms. P’ involves understand the substance of her predominantly Black and Latino learners as she attempts not only to teach them, but to instill them with a feeling of self-worth long stripped from their lives.

‘I have quite a spirited group of theatre kings, courtroom jesters, flyboy gangsters, tricksters, and wannabe pimps all in my charge, all up in my own face, to educate,’ Peterson discovers. ‘Corralling this motley team of bad-news bears to do any lesson is similar to running boot camp for hyperactive gremlins. I have to end up being consistent, alert, company, witty, fearless, and challenging, and most important, I must have strong control of the subject I’m teaching.’ Discipline is always a challenge, using the college students spouting street-infused backtalk and often bouncing from the walls with pent-up testosterone. Peterson learns quickly that she must keep carefully the upper hand-set the rules and enforce them with rigor, even though her sympathetic heart begins to waver.

Despite their relentless bravura and antics-and in part due to it-Peterson becomes a brutal advocate for her students. She functions to instill the teenagers, mostly black, with a feeling of pride about their background and tradition: off their African origins to Langston Hughes and Malcolm X. She encourages these to explore and communicate their true feelings by composing their personal poems and essays. When the males push her buttons (on an almost daily basis) she pushes back, demanding that they match not merely her anticipations or the specifications from the curriculum, but set anticipations for themselves-something many of them haven’t before been asked to accomplish. She witnesses some amazing successes as a number of the young boys enter into their very own under her tutelage.

Peterson vividly catches the jail milieu as well as the exuberance of the kids who’ve been handed a raw deal by society and have become shed within the system. Her amount of time in the class teaches her something, too-that these young boys desire to be rescued. They need normalcy and like and opportunity.