Brown Alumni Magazine>A Nation of Jailers

A Nation of Jailers

Economics professor Glenn Loury is speaking out about what he believes is one of the nation’s gravest injustices: despite falling crime rates, the number of black men sent to prison continues to rise. It's the latest cause for a man whose work has taken him from liberal to conservative and back again.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 2008

Standing in front of a room full of people, Glenn Loury stumbled. It was a rhetorical stumble, not a physical one. It came near the beginning of the first of two Tanner Lectures on Human Values he delivered at Stanford last April: "As it happens," he said, "I have passed through—" he paused briefly, taking a deep breath, "the courtroom, and the jailhouse, on my way to this distinguished podium.

Then he paused again, longer this time, collecting himself before reading the rest of the lecture. Later he recalled the moment: "It was harder for me to say than I realized it was going to be when I wrote it down on the page."

For Loury, the lectures marked an important moment on the long and ongoing trajectory that has joined his lived experience to his scholarship and his politics. Titled "Racial Stigma, Mass Incarceration, and American Values," the lectures brimmed with both moral passion and rigorous analytical scholarship, a combination that has become something of a trademark for him. The lectures asserted that the number of black men incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails—a number wildly disproportionate to their representation in the general population—reflects the social dishonor to which African Americans are still subject today, a dishonor with roots in U.S. slavery.

"We are becoming a nation of jailers, and racist jailers at that," Loury said later in the lecture. "We must ask, in light of our history, whether this is the nation we want to be. And, deciding not, we must then try to do something about it."

Loury has indeed committed himself to doing something about it. In addition to lecturing and writing on the issue, he appeared last year before a U.S. Congressional committee examining the economic costs of the surge in the nation's prison population. The issue has propelled Loury back into the role of public intellectual, a role he has flirted with through much of his career. As an economist, his work is to crunch numbers, but what the numbers have revealed to him has triggered his moral outrage. Loury makes no apologies for his attempts to "reach beyond science and, within the limits of my abilities, to address deeper questions." Unlike many of his academic colleagues, who after earning their PhDs obtain stable professorships and address their peers in scholarly journals, Loury's journey to Brown and the issue of prisons has taken unlikely twists and turns. It has involved not just the courthouse and the jailhouse, but years as a conservative pundit. It has included a religious rebirth followed by a repudiation of that religion, and now has brought him to the far left of the political spectrum.

The oldest of two children, Glenn Cartman Loury grew up on Chicago's South Side in the 1950s and 60s. Although the neighborhood was rough, Loury's family was comfortable enough. His father was a high-level administrator with the Internal Revenue Service and his mother a secretary with the Veterans Administration. He had cousins who were doctors and lawyers but, he recalls, he also had relatives and neighbors caught up in illegal activity.

The sociologist Elijah Anderson has described two broad categories of social orientation in inner cities: "decent families," who tend to be working poor (rather than unemployed) and who value self-reliance, hard work, education, and church; and "street families," who turn to lawlessness to make ends meet and violence to settle conflicts. Loury's family had a little of both, sometimes in a single person. "I'm talking about my uncle Mooney," Loury says. "He was a legitimate small businessman but also sold marijuana out the back of his barbershop, routinely. I'm talking about my great Aunt Candy, and Aunt Rosetta, who fenced stolen goods as a regular course of events. They had young women who were shoplifting clothing and foodstuffs from retailers, and they would get twenty cents or thirty cents on the dollar from my aunts, who then had big freezers in the basement. So that whenever you wanted to have a family thing, you knew that you didn't go and buy your ham and your turkey from the Stop & Shop. You went to Aunt Candy or Aunt Rosetta." When Loury gets excited telling these family stories, his voice clicks up a register or two. "These are church ladies with big hats!" he says. "They were salt of the earth, these people! But that's what they did."

One's racial identity was of primary importance in Chicago during that period. White flight had turned many of the city's neighborhoods into African American enclaves, and the civil rights and black power movements had fired up black youth, Loury included. In the prologue to his 1995 book of essays, One by One from the Inside Out, Loury tells a moving story about attending "one of those heated, earnest political rallies so typical of the period" with a longtime friend and neighbor, Woody. With two mixed-race parents, Woody looked white, but growing up in a black neighborhood with black friends, he identified as a "brother." When at the rally Woody raised his hand with a suggestion, Loury recalls that "one of the dashiki-clad brothers-in-charge" asked for someone in the audience to "vouch for this white boy." Eighteen-year-old Loury, fearing that "speaking up for Woody would have marked me as a disloyal 'Tom' among the blacker-than-thou crowd," said nothing. Years later, still cringing at his disloyalty, Loury continues to struggle with the issue of what it means to be "authentically black."

Even as his political approach to "the race problem" has veered sharply from left to right to center and back to the left again, Loury's foundational belief has remained consistent. He has always held that race is a "socially constructed mode of human categorization," as he wrote in his 2002 book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. The key intellectual innovation in this most recent of his books is the concept of "racial stigma," which he explains this way: "If we believe that people of a different look and hue and shape of face and such are different from us, and we act on that belief, we can create dynamics that make that a fact. Moreover, if we are unaware of how some of these influences bias and influence our conceptions in society, then we can draw conclusions and be very comfortable and set in those conclusions without interrogating them."

A heavyset man of fifty-nine, Loury sports a graying goatee and a presence that, although guarded at first, quickly softens. In conversation, he ranges from the formalized diction of the lecture hall to the chatty, easy way of a friend. He is unwilling to dumb down his opinions or his way of speaking. This has the effect of making people around him strive to be sharper, more well-read, quicker on their toes. He can be cocky, though not obnoxiously so, and his discourse is peppered with the names of his friends in high places.

Loury was an exceptionally bright student in high school, and, after graduating at age sixteen, he entered the Illinois Institute of Technology. But after his girlfriend—whom he later married—gave birth to their daughters, Lisa and then Tammy, Loury dropped out and took at job at a local printing plant. He continued to take night classes at a local junior college. (He also fathered a son, Alden, with another woman around this time.) Soon he had secured a scholarship to Northwestern, where once again he demonstrated great promise, particularly in mathematics and economics. In 1972, divorced from his first wife, he arrived at MIT and quickly became one of the top students in one of the top economics departments in the world.

Loury's 1976 PhD dissertation, "Essays in the Theory of the Distribution of Income," was a rigorous economics-based examination of why, years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, blacks still weren't getting ahead. He put forth a theory of "social capital," asserting that who a person knows—the informal networks and connections that can give one a leg up at everything from jobs to housing—matters at least as much as a person's intelligence or hard work. African Americans had few, if any, such networks. This view of racism as far beyond the simple fix of antidiscrimination laws and perpetuated by an ongoing, self-fulfilling social cycle, has since become one of the hallmarks of the American left and a frequent justification for affirmative action.

Over the next decade, however, Loury's thinking turned right and made him one of affirmative action's most outspoken black critics. He wrote essays and op-eds with such titles as "Beyond Civil Rights" and "Blacks Must Now Fight the Enemy Within," arguing that placing blame for the African American community's problems solely on white America was incorrect and counterproductive. "The bottom stratum of the black community," he wrote in a 1984 article in The New Republic, "has compelling problems which can no longer be blamed solely on white racism, and which force us to confront fundamental failures in black society. The societal disorganization among poor blacks, the lagging academic performance of black students, the disturbingly high rate of black-on-black crime, and the alarming increase in early unwed pregnancies among blacks now loom as the primary obstacles to progress." Personal responsibility became his mantra. Black folks, he said, needed to quit the blame game.

By 1982, when Loury, at age thirty-three, became the first tenured black professor in the Harvard economics department, he had gained a reputation as a brilliant, if ornery, iconoclast. He'd alienated such black leaders as Coretta Scott King and Jesse Jackson with his disdain for what he saw as their outdated approach to problems in the African American community. His intellectual allies were such conservatives as William Kristol and James Q. Wilson, who had the ear of the Reagan administration. By now, Loury was speaking publicly and vociferously against affirmative action. ("By what calculus of fairness can those claiming to be fighting for justice argue that outstanding white students ... should be denied the opportunity for ... education so that minority students who are not prepared for it may nonetheless enroll?" he wrote in "Beyond Civil Rights.") And even as old friends and family back home in Chicago were increasingly disappointed with what they saw as Loury's selling out, he says, "The answer I would give to that was, 'I'm a free thinker, and I go where the ideas lead me, and I'm sorry to disappoint you but I gotta speak the truth.' "

He resented the idea that he need hew to a party line because of his race. "I felt a little bit martyred," he recalls, "because, you know, these people gonna drop a ton of bricks on me just because I have the integrity to say what I think is correct? Because I'm black and I'm at Harvard I'm supposed to be part of some imaginary team that you people are constructing out there to help the race—quote-unquote? So now I've got a chip on my shoulder. You expect me to say something that is beyond the pale. In a way, I need to live up to that expectation. That's now my role. My role is to upset you."

In 1987, Loury's room in what he calls "the house that Reagan built" seemed secured when U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett offered him a position as under-secretary.

Meanwhile, thanks to President Reagan's War on Drugs and the generation of tough-on-crime policies that followed, Americans in general, and black men in particular, began going to prison in increasingly large numbers. "Two decades ago, it is fair to say, America faced a violent crime problem," Loury said in his Tanner Lectures. "This was a time when drive-by shootings and drug-deals-gone-violently-bad were common fare on local news, when the War on Drugs was taken to a new level, and 'gangsta' rap was born."

But, Loury now believes, like the drug use the incarceration boom was supposed to lessen, incarceration itself became an addiction. Once the United States began turning to lockup as the solution for a growing list of what had previously been considered social, not criminal, ills, it couldn't stop. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of people in U.S. prisons more than doubled. Although the rate of violent crime peaked in the early 1990s and has been declining ever since, between 1990 and 2000, incarceration rates nearly doubled again. Today, at least 1.6 million people are incarcerated in U.S. prisons. Include people on probation and parole, and the number jumps to more than seven million. According to a recent report from the Pew Center on the States, one of every 100 adults in the United States is behind bars—the highest incarceration rate in the world. As Loury points out in his Tanner lectures, Americans account for 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of its inmates.

"Today, fifteen years after crime peaked, the American prison system has become a leviathan unmatched in human history," he said. "Never has a supposedly 'free country' denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens."

The impact on communities of color has been enormous. According to U.S. Department of Justice figures, a black man has a 32 percent chance of entering state or federal prison during his lifetime. If current incarceration rates continue, one of every three black male babies born today will see the inside of a prison cell, a rate more than five times higher than that of white male babies. In many inner-city neighborhoods, a stint in prison is as much a rite of passage as graduation from high school. The effects of these incarcerations are not confined to the prison walls. More than half of state and federal inmates are parents of minor children; according to DOJ, black children are nearly nine times more likely than white children to have a parent in prison. Finding work for any person with a criminal conviction is already a challenge; for an African-American, that challenge can be almost insurmountable.

Prisoner statistics, Loury said in his Tanner lectures, tell only part of the story:

[N]o cost-benefit analysis of our world-historic prison build-up over the past thirty-five years is possible without specifying how one should reckon in the calculation the pain being imposed on the persons imprisoned, their families and their communities. How to value this aspect of policy is, to my mind, a salient ethical issue. Punishment politics, it seems to me, invariably discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists and, yes, of those whom we unceremoniously put to death. It should be clear that social science has no answers for the question of what weight to put on a "thug's" wellbeing, or on that of his wife or his daughter and son. Nor can Science tell us how much additional cost borne by the offending class can be justified in order to obtain a given increment in security of life and property—or in peace of mind—for the rest of us.

When Loury says "the rest of us," he includes himself in his audience of well-off academic peers. He is in a stable marriage to his second wife, Linda, with whom he is raising two teenage boys in an affluent Boston suburb. Yet in the same passage Loury points out that by virtue of his race, he is "knitted together with offenders in networks of social and psychic affliction." His admission to his audience at the start of the lecture that he had once been behind bars echoes powerfully. In a sense, he is siding with the "thug."

"This was a big deal," says Josh Cohen, a professor of political science and philosophy at Stanford and a friend of Loury. "To be doing these lectures and to be stepping outside of his usual responsibility as an economist to be talking about issues of political morality: it wasn't like there was some bold new moral idea in the lectures, but that's usually not the way moral thinking works. You get yourself worked up about a problem. Then you try to bring it to bear."

Throughout the 1980s, as Loury's professional influence grew, his personal life fell to pieces. By day, he lectured at Harvard alongside some of the top minds in economics and political science; by night, he ventured into housing projects and strip clubs, freebasing cocaine and picking up women. Even as he preached about personal responsibility, he frequented crack houses and nightclubs, where he was not a Harvard professor but just another brother, out looking for a good time.

"I knew how to talk and how to walk, not to seem an obvious mark in such a community so that I would get robbed," he says now. "I wore that as a secret badge of honor. It made me, in some way or another—nutty, nutty, I can't defend this—more authentically black somehow. This is sick, I would say in retrospect. But I believe it's an accurate reflection of what I actually thought in the back of my mind in those years."

Three months after he was offered the position in the Reagan education department, he withdrew his nomination, citing "personal reasons." Days later, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Pamela Foster brought assault charges against him. She was, it turned out, his mistress, living at his expense in a Boston apartment. Although the charges were eventually dropped, she accused Loury of dragging her down a flight of stairs and throwing her belongings out the window. Local newspapers had a field day. Here was a conservative unable to live up to his own gospel of personal responsibility.

"At the time, I guess the way I'd construe it was: what I'm saying is correct," he says now. "Whether I'm doing what's right is another matter. People should take better care of themselves. They should take care of their children, they should be responsible. If I fall short of that, well, there you are."

Loury's problems were far from over. His drug use continued to spiral out of control. His marriage was at its breaking point. Then, towards the end of the year, he was arrested for possession of marijuana and cocaine. Shortly after the scandal with Pamela Foster surfaced, Loury recalls, he remarked to his friend, the evangelical Catholic priest (Loury calls him a "theo-con") Richard Neuhaus, that Martin Luther King and John Kennedy also had mistresses. "If he could have slapped me, he would have," Loury says now. "But he gave me the stern reproach look, the equivalent of a slap in the face. And he said, 'It was a terrible flaw in King. It seriously compromised his effectiveness. And it's a flaw in you as well.'"

A judge agreed to drop the drug charges in exchange for Loury's entering rehab. He emerged, after several months, a changed man.

He was still conservative, but, as one old friend told the Boston Globe, he was a "sensitive conservative." He was also a born-again Christian. He and his wife, Linda, who shortly after Loury returned home from rehab gave birth to their son Glenn Jr., joined the Bethel AME Church. The couple's second son, Nehemiah, named after the Old Testament figure, was born three years later. The church's pastors, civic leaders in Boston, helped the Lourys rebuild their family. "They saved my life," says Loury. "Our children were born into this church. Our marriage was saved there."

In 1991, Loury left Harvard over the protests of his colleagues and joined the faculty at Boston University for a fresh start. Over the following decade, he tried—unsuccessfully, he now says—to straddle the line between his old commitment to conservatism and personal responsibility and his growing awareness of the structural issues preventing black people from achieving full integration in every aspect of American society.

His 1995 book, One by One from the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America, was an attempt to delineate this new, softer position. It contains an essay called "Leadership Failure and the Loyalty Trap," in which he returns to his old frustrations about the "loyalty" that blacks supposedly owe to a particular political ideology. He indicts the black community for, among other things, having "made excuses for and sometimes even glorified the supposedly rebellious actions of thugs" and having made "apologies for the able-bodied, healthy, and intelligent young men who gather children and then walk away from the responsibility to support them."

At the same time, the book is humbler than his previous work, steeped as it is in his new religious beliefs. Its epilogue reads like a searching and personal confession. It also closes with a scathing review of the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve, which asserts, in part, that a sizable proportion of America's (black) citizenry is simply not smart enough to grasp the nuance of anything less than a hard line on crime and parenthood, among other social ills.

The Bell Curve was one of a series of books published around that time by former friends and colleagues whose approaches to race made Loury increasingly uncomfortable. In 1995 Dinesh D'Souza published The End of Racism, in which he argued, among other things, that slavery was not a racist institution, and that the only reason racism continued to be a problem in the United States is because of such "racist" programs as multiculturalism and affirmative action. Crime and Human Nature, published in 1998 by James Q. Wilson (with whom Loury had, in 1987, co-edited a book) and Richard J. Hernnstein, argued that crime was caused by biological determinants, and that zero-tolerance policing with less emphasis on rehabilitation was the only answer. In 1999 Loury's old friends Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom cheerfully announced, in America in Black and White, that African Americans were doing just fine—better than ever, in fact—and that we should not impede their progress with such wrongheaded programs as affirmative action.

Loury began to speak out against such thinking, at first quietly, and then more forcefully, prompted in part by the chilly reception he received from conservatives for his critiques of their ideas on race. Commentary magazine, whose pages had contained many of his words over the years, refused to run his review of the The Bell Curve. The American Enterprise Institute, with which he'd long been affiliated, refused to repudiate D'Souza, who had written his book while he was a fellow there. Loury resigned in protest.

He also began to take himself to task for all the years he had provided political cover for what he was beginning to construe as thinly veiled racism among his colleagues. At a 1990 conference called Second Thoughts on Race, organized by the neoconservative David Horowitz, he gave a presentation in which he said that his agreement with conservatives on affirmative action "helps you to see your [position] as valid and nonracist. If by some magic I were suddenly to become white, my brilliant, perceptive, and courageous insights would just as suddenly be reduced to pedestrian, commonplace complaints, of little political or personal comfort to you."

Finally, in 1996, Loury reached a turning point. He and his old friend, fellow black conservative Shelby Steele, were assembling donors and board members for their new organization, the Center for New Black Leadership. California's Proposition 209, which proposed an amendment to the state's constitution prohibiting public institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in admissions or hiring decisions, had just been placed on the ballot. The Center's funders wanted Loury and Steele to come out in support of the measure. It should have been a no-brainer. Here was perhaps the most central issue of the era for both conservatives and African Americans, an issue that Loury had not minced words in criticizing over the years. "What is our brand, as black conservatives, if it's not that?" Loury recalls Steele asking him. But he found that he couldn't do it.

"What I said was, 'I'm against affirmative action, but this is over the top.' I tried to split the difference, which was a mistake," he now says. "I was for affirmative action, is what I should have been able to say, but I couldn't quite make myself say it." Instead, he resigned.

It was also around this time that Loury repudiated his religious beliefs. He had many long, searching conversations about his growing doubt with his Christian mentors and friends. He found it increasingly difficult to reconcile his religious beliefs with his faith in rationality and science. But the breaking point came with the death of a bright young woman who had worked as an administrative assistant in his office at Boston University. It had taken her into her thirties to finish college, and she was now pursuing her dream to go to law school. She'd had a wildly successful first year at BU's law school and had made law review when she died, suddenly, of a freak heart infection.

"I'm devastated by the tragedy of this young woman's death," Loury says, describing his feelings at the time. "Don't tell me that this is God's work and he knows better than me. You're just fooling yourself. You're afraid to look down in the abyss." He is still haunted by the image of the young woman's mother, at the funeral, smiling because God must have loved her daughter so much to take her away. "And basically I haven't been back to church since. There was no going back from that."

These days, Loury has found his footing to the left of center. He has repudiated many of his own former positions on public policy, but the core of his beliefs, he insists, was not wrong. It simply lacked context.

"I'm not eschewing personal responsibility," he says. "I don't want to say, a kid goes out and commits a crime, it's society's fault, it's not the kid's fault. The core of the error was a failure to give an appropriate weighting to the communal responsibilities of developing and sustaining a cultural milieu that's supportive of human development. I was loading way too much weight on this autonomous communal capacity—self help and so forth—vis-√†-vis questions like, What's the IRS doing? What are the police doing? How are cities and states organized? And what role does race play within that?"

Loury knows that his changes in position harm his credibility with some peers. Others, however, see his intellectual journey as evidence of his honesty. Economist and former Princeton president William Bowen has been one of Loury's friends and mentors. (Loury wrote the introduction to Bowen's most recent book, The Shape of the River, a defense of affirmative action in higher education.) "When people would accuse Gandhi of being inconsistent," Bowen says, "Gandhi would reply, 'my goal has never been to be consistent with myself from year to year, but to be consistent to the truth as it appears to me.' Really capable people think like that. That takes courage, and I admire it."

Loury arrived at Brown in 2005, after a falling-out with BU's president over funding for his Institute on Race and Social Division. He has thrown himself into the life of the University, serving on the Advisory Committee on Slavery and Justice, instituting a seminar series on race and inequality, and publishing several papers in both economics journals and the popular press. "He is a combination of someone who is an incredible theorist—who can think in terms of economic models in a sophisticated way—but who fundamentally cares about the most important issues of the day," says Andrew Foster, chairman of the economics department. "He's also clearly stimulating research in this area among grad students."

Given his complicated history, Loury has been an easy target for armchair psychoanalysis. A 1995 New Yorker profile speculated that he had turned away from some of his earlier hard-line stances because he was lonely; as a black conservative he didn't really "fit" anywhere. A longtime friend and colleague, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, was quoted in a 2002 New York Times profile as saying that Loury was "overcompensating" by listening to gangsta rap. And yet, even as his most recent crusade is deeply personal in some ways, he remains a consummate social scientist in others, and resents any implication that he is speaking out against racial inequality in mass incarceration as a way to assuage guilt or do penance for his former views.

Josh Cohen, the Stanford professor, recalls an incident during a series of seminars associated with the Tanner lectures. A politically progressive friend of Loury's made a joke about how Loury hadn't moved far enough to the left yet. "He used some sort of therapeutic vocabulary, like 'his treatment isn't quite done yet,'" Cohen recalls. "Glenn responded badly to that, and I agreed with him. He was saying, 'This is a matter of intellectual convictions. We're in this business of argument and analysis. It's really misguided to put this in the language of therapy and cure. It's about changing your mind. About being changed by reason.'"

Rhode Island Monthly>Bad Girls

Bad Girls

Doing time at the Rhode Island Training School is punishment for young women who break the law. What's surprising is how many would rather be in the big house than out.

Beth Schwartzapfel
April 2008

While she’s here, Diamond Jordan-Brown looks perpetually as if she just rolled out of bed: blue sweats, hair standing up in all directions. At eight this morning, she actually has just rolled out of bed. Diamond is sixteen and has the spunk and wit of a teenager but the poise and smarts of someone much older. Even now, as she shuffles across the white, linoleum-tiled hall into the day room and plops down on a vinyl-upholstered chair to wait for breakfast, it’s with the weary resignation of someone who’s seen it all.

If she were awaiting sentencing, or if the judge had sent her here for a few days to try to scare some sense into her—as he has before—she’d be wearing orange, walking around like a human traffic cone. But since she’s been sentenced—she’s more than halfway through a six-month “bid,” as the girls call it—she’s wearing “state blues”: state-issued blue sweatshirt, blue sweatpants, white sneakers.

On any given day, the Rhode Island Training School houses some 200 children. Administered by the Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), yet populated by those remanded here by the criminal justice system, the Training School exists at a crossroads between prison and foster care. It’s a juvenile correctional facility, make no mistake about it—double fences topped with razor wire surround the complex, and residents leave locked buildings only with handcuffs on—but it’s also a public high school and a place where children receive counseling and guidance. DCYF refers to it euphemistically as “a highly structured, secure residential facility,” and the children are called “residents” rather than inmates. The boys are divided into seven different residential “cottages” based on age, offense, treatment needs and behavior, but the girls (in 2006, 16 percent of the total population) are all housed here, in the Mathias building, a facility that feels more like a tidy, bright hospital wing than a prison. The unit consists entirely of one hallway, off of which are classrooms on one end and bedrooms on the other, and a dayroom, where the girls spend their downtime and eat their meals.

Diamond’s friend Jessica* is on kitchen duty this morning. While the rest of the girls filter in, she unwraps several loaves of white bread and pops slices into the industrial-grade toaster, six at a time; she tosses mini cartons of milk out of a crate and into the refrigerator, mixes bright green “juice” from syrup in a jug and distributes piles of paper napkins onto each table. A trolley has already arrived from the central kitchen with a giant steel tray of aluminum-foil-covered scrambled eggs, and she puts this tray out alongside mini plastic tubs of cereal and a bowl of fruit.

The count today is thirteen. At breakfast, the blues sit together at two tables, and the oranges sit together at a third.

Beyond this obvious self-segregation is a more subtle grouping organized roughly according to the Training School’s level system. There are four levels, each with a corresponding set of privileges (number of visits, visitors and phone calls allowed, bedtime). Training School residents enter at Level 2 and work their way up (or down) the levels by earning (or losing) points for things like working hard in school, attending groups and meetings, keeping their room clean, following instructions and volunteering to help out around the unit.

Because it takes up to six weeks to gain a level, girls at Level 3 or 4 have usually been here for longer than girls at Level 1 or 2; what’s more, only girls with good behavior and a positive attitude tend to earn enough points to move up. All of which contributes to the fact that girls in the various levels tend to stick together. “Our clique is basically Level 3s,” says Jessica. “When you’re down there, at Level 2, Level 1, you have nothing better to do [than pick fights]. Elbowing in the hallway, pushing in the bathroom, swearing across the tables. We have to just ignore them. It’s kinda like we just brush them off our shoulder.”

One of the girls in her clique is Diamond, who is serving a six-month sentence for assault, intimidating a witness and disorderly conduct—all charges related to a fight with another girl that got out of hand. Later, I visit Diamond at home after her release (she ended up serving four months), and she couldn’t look more different than she did when we first met: She cuts a dashing figure with long, braided extensions in her hair, tight jeans, knee-high zip-up boots.

Diamond and her mother, Auretha, are very close. In the months leading up to Diamond’s incarceration, Auretha tells me she was becoming increasingly frustrated. Diamond loved to party and stay out late. She’d be home only for as long as it took to dump off her bag after school and leave again. What’s more, she’d get into so many fights that eventually girls started arriving at their family’s house and telling Auretha to get Diamond so they could fight her.

“I wasn’t the type of person, before I went in there, to just let little petty stuff go,” recalls Diamond. “You could roll your eyes and I was on you. Anything could trigger me. You could walk by me and almost brush my shoulder. You was going down.” She laughs when she says it, but she has an iron will; she must have been scary. The judge sent her to the Training School for a night two years ago after a fight, but it didn’t stick. Diamond had seven cousins there at the time, so it seemed like a sort of rite of passage. Sure enough, a few months later, she was back, this time for real.

The first few months of her sentence were marked by her typical behavior. On her very first day, she shoved a staff member who was bothering her. “It took her two to three months to realize what was really happening,” says Auretha. “Before, she was really angry when I’d go visit her. She didn’t like this staff, she didn’t like that staff. Then she just did a three-sixty. She knew, what I’m doing right now is not going to get me out of here.”

After breakfast, the girls spend a quiet half-hour in the dayroom, watching television, chatting or flipping through magazines before heading off to class. The boys’ school, because it has so many more students, operates much the same way as other Rhode Island public schools. The girls’ school, on the other hand, has only two classrooms, one for special education students and one for everyone else, where the girls, with wildly varying grade levels and skills, work more or less independent of each other, with guidance from a teacher.

During class, minor tiffs erupt about who’s sitting in whose chair, and who graffitied on the chalkboard.

“Stories on the outside are you’re going to get beat up [in here],” says Jessica. But this is no vigilante jailhouse. Physical fights like those that Diamond used to get into are rare here, Jessica says. The Training School “doesn’t test you like that,” she says. “It doesn’t test your strength. It tests you emotionally. It tests you mentally. The stress of when you have court. The stress of having to sit in a holding cell all day, just to know you’re coming back here. The stress of knowing that your visit may not come this weekend. The staff might not let you make a phone call. You might not be able to talk to your parents all week. You might not get your deodorant, and you might have to smell. Go a week without getting letters and see how it feels. If you don’t get your mind right, if you don’t have that emotional breakdown here, you’re going to come back. If people walk out and say, ‘My time was easy,’ they’re going to come back. If I’m like, ‘My time was hard, I almost went crazy in there, I was sick in there, it killed me emotionally, I’m so happy to be out now,’ I’m less likely to come back.”

Emotions run high. Social worker Sirinath Seneth is the female unit manager; before this summer, when she began the top job here, she was a clinical social worker in two of the boys’ units: the maximum security facility (known as the Youth Correctional Center) and the substance abuse unit. More often the victims of trauma and abuse, she says, “the girls are more needy. With the boys, forty or fifty kids? I can cover it. Here, with only ten or fifteen girls, it’s difficult. They get nervous, they get anxious about what it’s going to be like when they get home. They get jealous, they get mad, they talk about each other.” With the boys, Seneth said, she had to ask them to come see her. “Don’t you have issues at all?” she would joke. Whereas, with the girls, “if you don’t see them for one day, two days, they want to know why they haven’t seen you.” Juvenile Program Worker Dawn Nunez agrees. “The girls are too needy,” she says. “They’re much more emotional” than the boys.

Mandated both to enforce the rules and to provide emotional support and encouragement, Juvenile Program Workers, or JPWs, are something of a cross between correctional officers and Big Brothers/Big Sisters mentors. Residents call them by their first name, with an honorific tacked on: Miss Jackie, Miss Michelle. To be hired, they must have a minimum of an associate’s degree and some work experience with adolescents; many have worked previously in group homes or residential programs. Before being hired, JPWs attend a six-week academy where they learn everything from fire safety to restraint techniques. One of the key things taught at the academy is the virtue of a “redirect.”

If a child talks back or disobeys an order, explains Joe Cardin, deputy superintendent of programs at the Training School, “you don’t make a big investment in it. And you certainly don’t go back to that schoolyard thing: escalation. The next thing you know you want to kill each other,” he says. This is, philosophically speaking, a huge departure from the classic correctional model, where if an inmate challenges the staff’s authority, the staff must reassert who’s in charge at all costs. Cardin recalls a recent incident where a pregnant resident refused to go to her room when instructed. The wrong response, according to Cardin, would have been, “‘Well, you’d better go to your room.’ [Because] then you get, ‘Well, put me in my room.’ Then you’re at a point as a staff member where you’ve just been called out. So what do you do? Do you people really want to drag a nine-month-pregnant female to her room? Does that make a lot of sense to you? Just walk out of that. There’s no direct threat to anyone. Except your ego.” Instead, staff members told the resident, “Fine, sit there if you want. We’ll come back in ten minutes.” She did, and they did, and then
she went to her room.

Very few girls are sent to the Training School for violent felonies. Training School data, which reflect the residents in custody on a single day in 2007, indicates that only two girls out of sixteen, or 12.5 percent, were serving time for felony assault. The largest proportion, almost 40 percent, was there for simple assault, a misdemeanor. The remainder were incarcerated for crimes against property, illegal-substance-related crime, and obstruction: resisting arrest or escape. Boys were more likely than girls to be serving time for violent felonies—almost 20 percent were there for felony assault or first- or second-degree sex crimes—but the majority of boys, too, were there for nonviolent crimes, about 40 percent of which were crimes against property.

Like many of its residents, Jessica is no stranger to the Training School. (According to an analysis by Rhode Island Kids Count, 25 percent of youth at the Training School in 2006 had been incarcerated previously.) This marks her fifth time here, though her previous visits were for a night or two, a week at most.

At sixteen, her skin is lightly smattered with acne, and her soft face still lacks the sharp angles of adulthood. Her boyfriend’s name is inked in dark-lettered script on her shoulder.

“They’d always say, do this program, let us see that you’re doing good at home, and you can go home for good,” she recalls. “I never got to that point [of changing her ways]. Reality didn’t hit.” Now that reality has hit, Jessica has the kind of perspective on her life and her behavior that she’d lacked.

Her mother was only fourteen when Jessica was born. Their closeness in age meant that it wasn’t always clear who was in charge—at least not to Jessica. “I wanted to be the mom,” she says. Shortly after Jessica was born, her father was sentenced to forty years in the ACI for second-degree murder. Her mother met her current husband while he was in the ACI serving time for breaking and entering; they got married while he was still locked up. “Me and my sister felt like she was picking him over us,” Jessica recalls. “She would always be at his visits, every other day, put money in his account when she couldn’t even buy us something. It was real hectic.”

Her stepfather was released about a year ago, and her young-est sister was born shortly after that.

Still, things didn’t start to get really out of control until about three years ago, when her father’s parole date began to approach. “When it started getting close to him going up for parole, I started acting up to my mom, yelling at my mom, disrespecting my mom,” she recalls. “Kinda like, ‘I don’t need you, I’m going to have dad.’” It only got worse when he was released, though, and all of the promises he’d made to her over the years—trips to the zoo and to the mall, quality time together—were broken one by one. “He was doing his own thing; he didn’t want to deal with nobody,” she says.

Jessica’s fights with her mother escalated to the point that in 2004 her mom filed a Wayward/Disobedient Petition with the local police department, essentially a parent’s way of asking law enforcement for help controlling her child. The petition brought Jessica into the orbit of the Family Court, which handles all juvenile justice cases. From there, the judge placed her in one group home after another, and in the group homes, she’d get into fights, she’d skip school, she’d run away.

In fact, that word “run” echoes through the girls’ unit at the Training School. The girls in orange, the girls in blue, from one DCYF placement to the next: run, run run. “This stuff shouldn’t be bringing kids into core corrections,” says Joe Cardin. “But they only come here because the courts tried alternatives, like probation, and the kids run. They always run.” Violation of probation, truancy, disorderly conduct, violation of probation, vagrant and disorderly conduct, reads one girl’s charge sheet, a litany of misdemeanors. Another sheet includes fully nine counts of violation of probation, or VOP, which means, usually, she ran. Wayward/disobedient, violation of probation, escape, simple assault, truancy. “It’s kind of like a broken record,” says Cardin.

As the chief judge of the Rhode Island Family Court, Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah sees a lot of these children in front of his bench. A man of imposing girth who’s known to many of the kids in the system as a sympathetic listener—“He feels people,” says Diamond—he says he hates to send kids to the Training School, but often he has no choice: “What do you do when you say to a child, ‘Here’s the deal: I want you to go to school regularly. I want you to respect your teachers. I want you home at eight every night. And if [you meet] those conditions, then I’m going to suspend your sentence.’ What do you do when they don’t follow those conditions? I don’t think you have any choice but to send them. Because otherwise they’d laugh at you.”

In fact, for some girls, visits to the Training School become as much, or even more, a part of the fabric of life as school and family. I visited the Training School twice over a one-month period, and on my second visit, one girl I’ll call Ramirez reminded me that I’d met her a month ago. “I was in orange then. I’m in blue now,” she says. “I got sentenced.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I tell her.

“That’s okay,” she says. “I won’t be here long.” We are eating a lunch of soggy grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup with plastic spoons out of Styrofoam bowls and canned pineapple rings. Most of the girls are complaining about the food, a common refrain in the dayroom, and discussing what their first meal “on the out” would be: Chinese food, homemade lasagna. From there it’s a quick jump to how uncomfortable the beds are. Ramirez pipes up to say she doesn’t mind the food. Or the beds, for that matter. “I actually kind of like it here,” she says. I ask why. “I feel more...” she pauses to find the right word. “Stable. When I’m not here, I’m running.”

Data provided by the Training School indicates that Ramirez’s experience is not unusual. Of the sixteen girls incarcerated on a single day last spring, only four had been living with a parent or family member immediately prior to incarceration; nine had been living in a group home, residential facility or shelter. Three had been AWOL, which is to say, running. (This data stands in stark contrast to the boys, almost 50 percent of whom had been living with one or both parents prior to incarceration.)

Once they are in the system, many girls rack up enough misdemeanors and violations of parole that it is only a matter of time before they get caught up in something more serious. For Jessica, that something turned out to be possession and delivery of marijuana. Jessica doesn’t even do drugs, she says. Her grandmother died of complications from drug addiction, and her father gets abusive when he’s drinking, which, these days, is often. “It’s in the family, and I don’t want that to happen to me,” she says. But still, her boyfriend had been shipped to his native Dominican Republic to clean up his act (like Jessica, he entered the system at fifteen or sixteen and had been in and out of group homes and the Training School ever since), and she was trying to make some quick money to bring him back. There was already a warrant out for her because she was on the run from a program, and when the cops found her, they also found the drugs. If she hadn’t had the drugs on her, she says, “I would’ve just had a violation of probation, probably go to another group home. But in a way, I think it was God that did that. If I didn’t have the drugs, and I got sentenced to another group home, I would’ve ran. I would have a warrant out for my arrest right now. On the street, having to watch my back all the time.”

It’s decidedly unnerving to hear one girl after another say that, ultimately, she’s glad she was incarcerated. Diamond feels the same way. Now that she’s home, she says, “There’s no fun in what I used to do.

Before, my mentality was just like party, party, party hard. Now, I kind of get a head-ache around loud music.” Two months before her release, Diamond’s social worker held her prerelease meeting at the Training School. In addition to Diamond and the social worker, also present were Seneth (the unit manager), Auretha and outreach workers from two different programs in the community. Together they crafted her release plan: Meet each of the outreach workers plus her parole officer once per week. Other girls’ plans are more elaborate, including visits with psychiatrists or social workers, curfews, attendance at school and other such restrictions, but, according to Auretha, the team decided these weren’t necessary for Diamond. She’d always done well in school, and her adviser—she goes to the Met School, which stresses individual attention —had been visiting her weekly while she was incarcerated so she would be able to dive right back in when she got out. And so she has, becoming a tour guide for visitors and prospective students at her school and teaming up with some fellow students to plan a volunteer trip to Africa for three weeks this spring.

Being away from her family, says Diamond, helped her learn not to take them for granted. By the end of her sentence she was entitled to two visits per week, and if her mother wasn’t there every Sunday and every Wednesday, Diamond was heartbroken. (“This girl is spoiled,” her mom says.)

“I’m glad I went,” Diamond says of her time at the Training School. “I’m not glad I was there for that long. It didn’t take me that long to get the picture. But if I didn’t [go], I’d probably be in a worse predicament than I was in.”

I ask Diamond and her mother if there is an alternative to the Training School that would have had the same effect. They’re sitting beside each other on the couch in their tidy Pawtucket living room, and images on the muted television dance silently in the background. Neither of them can think of anything. “She needed that long bid,” says Auretha.

Judge Jeremiah suggests that an effective foster care environment, like a group home but less institutional, a place where guardians can provide the guidance and support and structure that the kids so badly need, would be a better place to send kids like Jessica and Diamond. “Nobody cares about kids,” he says. “They don’t vote. So they’re hurting.” The foster care system and alternatives to the Training School are not allocated the resources they need. “It’s about money,” Jeremiah says.

Parenting classes and additional resources for families would also help. Many of these kids’ parents never learned how to parent because they grew up in similar environments to the ones they’re providing for their kids. “Sometimes they don’t know how to nurture their babies, even to hug them,” Siri Seneth says of the girls’ parents. “Because they never got that from their parents.”

Jeremiah agrees. “It’s a breakdown of the family unit,” he says. “I think that’s what lands them [at the Training School]. How often does somebody say to a child, ‘I love you’? How often do they say to their child when they come home from school —say they had a 70 average, now they have a 78 average—‘Gee, congratulations, you’re doing better.’”

However, indifferent or ineffectual parents are better than the alternative. Many of the residents were victims of abuse, whether at their family’s home, at a group home, or while on the run. An analysis by Rhode Island Kids Count found that on a given day 48 percent of adjudicated youth at the Training School were victims of documented abuse or neglect. All of this can lead to some serious emotional struggles and mental illness. “For females in particular, comorbidity [having more than one psychiatric diagnosis] is the norm rather than the exception,” says Dr. Joseph V. Penn, director of psychiatric services at the Training School. “With all of the physical trauma and abuse, this may be the first place they feel safe. They’re like pinballs all over the system. They get here, and they’re locked down; they finally realize they’re not going anywhere, and they start to make real therapeutic progress.”

Since she’s been at the Training School, Jessica has been involved with programs about anger management, personal responsibility, safe sex, and loss and grief. She attends the speech and debate classes taught each week by Brown University students. She’s involved in Project Peer, a program where residents at Levels 3 or 4 can apply to be a motivational speaker for kids who have gotten into trouble; the judge sends them by the vanload to the Training School for an afternoon to see what’s in store for them if they keep it up. She’s also earning her GED. “My thing was I could always start something, but I could never finish it,” she says. “Now I’m actually getting certificates. I’m actually going up in levels. I chose to finish those groups.

I don’t have to. I chose to work up the level system. I’m choosing to use my time wisely here.”

When Jessica is released, she plans to enroll in Community College of Rhode Island and take classes towards becoming a dental hygienist. She’ll move back in with her mother, but since her boyfriend is back in Providence with his own apartment, Jessica knows she has a pressure valve, someplace she can go to get away from it all rather than fight with her mom. “I’m doing it for my sisters,” she says. “Because my sister is going down the same exact path that I did—acting up, talking back to my mom, everything. It’s all coming out. I got a feeling that she might come here,” and she wants her sister to see that there’s another way.

Classes end for the day at 2:30 p.m., and the girls spend an hour and a half in their rooms, doing homework, napping, writing letters. At 4, pairs of girls are handcuffed to one another and loaded into a big silver van in which they’re driven to the gym for a surprisingly spirited game of indoor soccer. At 5:30, while everyone else is showering, Jessica starts setting up for tonight’s dinner and wonders aloud about what her next job is going to be when kitchen duty ends tonight (“All I can say is it’d better not be bathroom.”) At 6, Miss Michelle shouts, “Ladies! To your doors with everything you need for the day- room!” At 6:30, a JPW named Tay is dishing out dinner, and by 7, Jessica and one of her fellow residents are clearing tables, wiping them down, folding them and wheeling them into the corner. They clean out the fridge while two other girls sweep. And then everyone settles down to play cards until bedtime. These girls, along with the JPWs, are singularly focused, fierce competitors at spades. The bedtime for Level 3s like Jessica and Diamond is 10:30, but Tay lets them and their friend, Julie, who’s still at Level 2, stay up until 11, because their game is so heated. The television mounted on the wall plays a baseball game nobody’s watching.

Although her time here has been marked by slow emotional progress, Jessica knew coming in that this time would be different. “I knew I had to change,” she says. “It’s the end of the road. I’ll have another year until I’m eighteen. This is the end of my childhood. I don’t want to waste it in another group home. I try to tell girls who run, you cannot run forever.”

*Jessica's name and identifying details have been changed per her mother's request.

Rhode Island Monthly>A Dollar and a Dream

A Dollar and a Dream

By Beth Schwartzapfel
September 2006

Bruno Barata is pacing. A chubby but compact boy, Barata can’t seem to stand still. “If you get nervous,” says theater instructor Karen Carpenter, “just take a minute and reconnect with Willie.”

Barata, thirteen, is auditioning to be part of the incoming fall 2006 freshman class at Pawtucket’s Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing and Visual Arts. For his audition, he has chosen to perform one of Willie Loman’s monologues from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. “A pretty mature choice for an eighth grader,” says Carpenter.

When he’s done, Carpenter hands him a packet of paper. It’s a monologue from Tom Griffin’s The Boys Next Door. Barata is supposed to do a cold reading of a monologue by Jack Palmer, the caretaker at a home for developmentally disabled men. “This is what we call direct address, so talk directly to the audience and just enjoy it,” says Carpenter.

He tries to enjoy it. He really does. But he’s just so nervous. So the lines come out sounding not like Jack Palmer, but like a nervous teenager reading them off the page. Carpenter takes a different tack. “Let me ask you a question,” she says. And she makes Barata hunt through the monologue for some details, to help him get to know Jack Palmer.

“How long has he been working there?” (Eight months.)

“How many men live there?” (Seventeen.)

“How old are they?” (Adults.)

“When he says ‘escapades,’ what does he mean?” Barata looks through the script and starts to describe some of the antics of the house’s residents. The meaning of the words suddenly sinks in. He giggles. “Yes!” exclaims Carpenter. “Those are the escapades! Enjoy them!”

Aside from playing improvisation games with his cousins, watching the ABC comedy-improvisation show “Whose Line Is It Anyway,” and generally making people laugh, Barata has had no training that would bring him closer to his goal of being an actor and comedian. But, he says, “I get a feeling when I do it. It just feels right.” He has been meticulous about preparing his audition, calling the school several times to confirm the date and time and to field help in choosing his monologue. That enthusiasm, says Carpenter, “that’s the biggest thing.”

Equal parts Fame! and Lean on Me, the Pawtucket public school opened last fall with aspirations to be a competitive conservatory-style school that feeds into such prestigious institutions as Berklee and Julliard. Admission is by audition only, and, in addition to their academic classes, students are subject to a rigorous curriculum in their chosen artistic specialty. At the same time, the school is part of an inner-city school system whose two other high schools — Tolman and Shea — face corrective action, with consistently low test scores and dropout rates above 30 percent. The result of these competing atmospheres is that the school is very much like its students: it has talent and commitment, ambition and drive, but few material resources and little formal training.

The Walsh School was the brainchild of Pawtucket Public Schools superintendent Hans Dellith. The year was 2000. Members of the Gamm Theatre company, having outgrown their quarters in Providence, hatched the idea of turning the empty Pawtucket Armory into a center for the arts, with themselves as lead tenants. Seth Handy, then the president of the Gamm’s board, approached Dellith about collaborations between the potential new arts center and the Pawtucket School Department: perhaps the Gamm could stage plays in the schools, or the kids could come over to the Armory to work with the artists? Dellith took it up a notch. Perhaps Pawtucket needed an arts high school. “I’d go to school productions, and I’d see a tremendous amount of talent with the students,” says Dellith, who has headed the school department for nine years.” I came up with the idea that maybe what we should do is broaden our horizons and start thinking about what we could do for students in terms of training them.”

The newly established Pawtucket Armory Association negotiated with the city to buy the hulking castle on Exchange Street for $1 and a promise to perform extensive renovations and reinvent the building as the Arts Exchange. A school for the performing and visual arts was to be one of the building’s first tenants.

If Dellith conceived the Walsh School, then its midwife was an affable and energetic Pawtucket native named Donna Jeffrey. Jeffrey, fifty-five, is a classical guitarist and renaissance lute player who began teaching music in the Pawtucket public schools thirty-two years ago. Jeffrey talks about the arts like a physician talks about medicine. When asked why the arts are important, she replies with another question: “Why is breathing important?” Over the years, she followed whatever career path afforded her as much time as possible with students. Early on in her career, for instance, when the budget for her elementary music education program was slashed, “I went from seeing kids twice, three times a week to seeing them every other week,” she says. “And what teacher can teach anything once every other week?” She responded by creating after-school musical productions that kids could participate in, singing, dancing and acting in Disney stories and other favorites like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. That way, she says, she could “see them not only in music class but also get them after school.” When a high school job became available, the lure of daily music classes was too strong to pass up. “Imagine what I could do if I saw them every day!” she recalls thinking. And so she left for Shea High School, where she taught for eleven years, during which time she created a steel drum ensemble and taught guitar and chorus classes.

Hans Dellith knew a dedicated arts educator when he saw one, so he tapped into Jeffrey’s enthusiasm and experience when the arts high school was in its early stages. She started attending meetings. Then, when a real school began to take shape, she cut her schedule at Shea back to half-time in order to coordinate the nuts and bolts of bringing it into the world: writing curricula, drafting budgets, creating guidelines for hiring, auditions and admissions, and working with architects and construction teams to turn the second and third floors of the armory into classrooms and studios. All along, however, she planned to usher the school into existence and then return to her steel drums. To head the new school, she says, “I wanted a person who was a principal, who had a degree in fine arts, who had experience as an administrator and in the arts. I didn’t want the job.”

But then came June 2005. The Pawtucket city council had been level-funding the school department for more than a decade, so the city had long relied on the state’s yearly increases in contributions. In an economy where costs are always increasing, level-funding is the practical equivalent of slashing funds. When the state announced that it too was level-funding the Pawtucket schools, suddenly the school committee faced $8 million in deficits. The arts school — along with any other expenditure deemed not absolutely necessary — was on the chopping block. In the end, the school eked into existence when Jeffrey, Dellith and others slashed its budget from $1.5 million to $559,000. One of the cuts was the principal’s job, to be replaced by a lower-paid school coordinator. Jeffrey recalls thinking to herself, “If they’re not going to get someone in here who has more experience and knowledge of this than me, then I will go for the job.”

The former deputy superintendent of schools, a much-beloved woman named Jackie Walsh, had died of cancer the previous fall. She had always been an advocate for the arts. Dellith and Jeffrey agreed that naming a new school after her would be a fitting tribute. And so the Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing and Visual Arts opened its doors on August 31, 2005, with Donna Jeffrey at its helm. It had admitted its first freshmen class the previous spring, and the plan was to add a class each year so that the school would have four classes by 2009.

Looking back, it seems to have been the obvious next step for Jeffrey. From every other week, to after school, to every day, she has finally settled in a school where more than three hours a day are dedicated to the arts. “Even in schools that have wonderful music and art programs, kids usually only have one — maybe if they’re lucky, two — classes a day in the arts,” she says. “These kids are living and breathing it all day long.”

And even if they don’t ultimately pursue a degree at a conservatory or a career in the arts, Jeffrey is sure that the school’s curriculum provides a solid enough foundation for students to follow their hearts, wherever they lead.

“I want to be a dancer,” says fifteen-year-old Walsh student Iesha Bemway. She pauses to consider her options. “Or singer. Or actor.”

“Yeah,” chimes in Keisha Fordham, fourteen, also a student. “Cause you always have to have a backup plan, in case things don’t work out.”

Tall, slim and muscular, Bemway has an angular jaw and a big, toothy smile. She and her friends are finishing their lunch in a noisy tall-ceilinged makeshift lunchroom before heading back to class. Zuleika Castro is a dance major at Walsh like Bemway, but she has other career plans. “I want to go to business school,” she says, noting that what she has learned at the Walsh School will help her when she gets there. “In dance, you got to follow all the rules, and trust me, there’s a lot of rules. And you got to take this stuff serious. And if I can take dance serious, I can take that into the business world.”

The Walsh School’s thirty-one students — nine boys and twenty-two girls — start up the armory’s big stone steps around 7:45 a.m., trudging sneakers and boots over the giant anchor mosaic at the top of the landing. Five are music majors, four study theater, ten dance, and twelve focus on visual art. About half receive free or reduced lunch. Those who live outside Pawtucket must pay $15,000 per year tuition; there are only two students who do so, one from Burrillville and one from Central Falls. The school occupies the second and third floors of the armory, and the renovations have lent the space the feeling of both a school and a place with history. The walls are painted in bright yellows and whites. The little bank of lockers is blue. Most classrooms have high ceilings, at least one wall of exposed brick and tall windows.

The students gather in the room on the second floor that serves as classroom, studio and cafeteria for breakfast and the pledge of allegiance. From 8:30 a.m. until 1:45 p.m., they take the usual range of academic subjects. At 2:00 p.m., while giant yellow buses begin pulling up to the curb next door at Tolman High School to take the students home for the day, work at the Walsh School is just beginning. First the students take a crossover class; a music student, for instance, can take a visual art class, or a dancer can take theater. Then they have three hours of class in their chosen major. The three hours are broken up into blocks, which might include theory, exercises and practice.

Nancy Rosenberg, a working composer with the demeanor of a hip mom, is equally comfortable discussing the Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly as the hip-hop duo Outkast. Pairing students with working artists was one of the goals of the school, and this is reflected in the teaching staff. Karen Carpenter, the theater teacher, is in the company at the Gamm. Tovah Bodner, the dance teacher, directs her own dance company called the Robin’s Egg. And Chris Kane, the visual art teacher, is a sculptor who runs the metals foundry at the Steelyard, an industrial art center in Providence.

When auditions for the school were first planned, sight-reading — performing a piece of music by looking at it, without preparation — was to be one of the requirements for the music majors. But in order to sight-read, students have to know how to read music. Many of the auditioning students sang in their church choirs or with their friends, but few had had formal training. The audition criteria were quickly adapted.

“I don’t care if they sight-read,” says music teacher Nancy Rosenberg. “I’ll teach them to sight-read. I am less interested in what training they’ve received before they arrive than in raw talent and commitment.”

It’s a good thing that the students, for the most part, are starting from scratch. It’s a good thing, too, that they have the dedication required to stick it out despite tough circumstances. Because a student who is already a musical impresario might find the resources at the Walsh School to be somewhat lacking. For instance, when the class studies music theory, Rosenberg pulls out a giant cardboard keyboard, with Velcro dots marking the notes they’re discussing. It’s a far cry from the school where she previously taught, the Boston Arts Academy, a public school much like what the Walsh School aspires to be. It has a full recording studio, every imaginable musical instrument and five music faculty. Comparing the two schools is like “apples and oranges,” says Rosenberg. The Walsh School, on the other hand, has five synthesizers, a battered upright piano and a lengthy wish list:

Drum set with cymbals: $2,000.
Grand piano for performances: $9,000.
Two baby grand pianos: $7,000 each.
Electric guitar, amplifier and case: $800.

That’s only part of the wish list, and that’s only for music. Under “general equipment,” the list even includes twenty cases of Xerox paper and twenty bottles of Wite-Out. “We’ve been living on next to nothing,” says Jeffrey. Aside from the teachers’ salaries and the lease, which the school department pays, “everything has been donated or bought by me,” she says. However, “it’s more important that we’re open than that we have everything we need.”

While Bruno Barata is downstairs pacing during his audition, a handful of other eighth graders wait upstairs for their turn. Marc Tiberius has been acting in after-school programs at Slater Middle School. He had planned to go to Shea High School, until he heard about this school. “I was really excited to find out there was a school for acting,” he says. His dad is excited, too. “I would have killed to have a school like this,” he says.

Jeffrey and Dellith had hoped that each of the admitted classes would have one hundred students, with the number of students topping out at 400 in 2009. However, the numbers have been disappointing so far. Last year, sixty-five auditioned, forty-five were accepted, and thirty-three came (two have since left). This year’s auditions have yielded roughly the same results. They blame the low numbers on the fact that the school’s fate has been so uncertain. In August of last year, just weeks before the school was scheduled to open, Jeffrey was forced to send a letter to the families of newly admitted students warning that the school might not open after all. And though it did finally happen, the construction wasn’t finished in the Armory yet, so the students had to spend the first few weeks in the old Registry Building. Dellith still can’t promise that the school will survive past its infancy, though he says he will continue to fight to keep it open. “These parents are the pioneers,” acknowledges Jeffrey. “There are a lot of families that would have liked to send their kids here, but they were afraid to take the chance. And I feel sad for them.”

The school’s small size, however, has had a positive consequence: family atmosphere. “We see this small group of students every day,” says biology teacher Julia Goulet. “We get a better idea of what their day is going like, and what might be going on in their lives that might be interfering with their schoolwork. It’s a luxury to have the classes be small and manageable.”

What’s more, that the students are committed to their art contributes to a unique atmosphere. “In many other schools,” says Spanish teacher Kayla Campbell, “kids have no interest in school at all. These kids have an interest in being here.” Goulet, who taught at Tolman High School for thirty-five years, says the biggest difference she sees is in attendance. Walsh boasts an attendance rate of 96 percent, at least 10 percent higher than attendance at other Pawtucket public schools. “They want to be here,” she says. “They are here every day.”

Hans Dellith can’t dance.

He says that he has not two, but three left feet. But he knows the power of dancing. “What distinguishes us from the animal world are things like art, philosophy, music, dance, theater,” he says. “All the things that really make us human, these things are very important.” He recalls a day that he visited Tovah Bodner’s class; his dedication to art education was redoubled by what he saw there. “I’m watching this student do a dance routine, and I’m watching the intensity of her performance,” he says. “I’ve never seen that type of intensity in a math class, in an English class, in a phys-ed class, or anywhere else.”

At a time when budgets are being slashed at public schools around the country, the arts are usually the first to go. Nancy Rosenberg herself used to teach music at Feinstein High School in Providence, until her position was cut. “I became a professional musician studying music in the public schools,” she says. “That’s almost impossible right now.” She likens teaching art in a public school to the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, wherein a besieged Jim Carrey must chase after his memories as they are being eliminated. “I feel like I’m running around as the music programs are disappearing underneath me,” says Rosenberg. “People don’t understand what is at stake when you do that.”

Unfortunately, Rosenberg was more correct than she could have known in February. Over the summer, she was laid off from the Walsh School due to cutbacks in the city’s school department, and replaced by a music teacher with seniority in the Pawtucket public schools, as per union policy.

Every student, whether or not he possesses natural artistic talent, deserves a chance to study art, “the opportunity to be exposed to a musical way of thinking,” in Rosenberg’s words. And while the Walsh School offers art education only to those students who are talented and dedicated enough to audition, be accepted and work hard, it marks a resounding commitment to the arts by a beleaguered public school system that could have said “not now.”

It’s been worth every minute, says Donna Jeffrey, to help the students work toward their goals. “I want them to choose the field they’re happy in,” she says. “I want them to go off and light the world on fire in whatever area is their love.”

Rhode Island Monthly>God is in the Details

God Is In the Details
Woonsocket’s own Sistine Chapel ducked the wrecking ball six years ago. Its second resurrection requires $3.5 million. Can it survive without divine intervention?

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 2006

Photographs reproduced here courtesy of Nat Rea.

This piece was awarded 1st place in the in the religion category in the Rhode Island Press Association's 2006 Editorial Awards.



The red and white house on the corner of Robinson Street and Progresso Avenue in Woonsocket has always been a busy but orderly place. The Doiron family has five kids, with eleven years separating the youngest from the oldest. But Yvette Doiron, the matriarch, “ran a pretty tight household,” recalls Dominique, twenty-seven, the youngest. And, like most of the other families in the neighborhood, the Doirons were a working-class, French-Canadian family. The parents of both Yvette and her husband, Ray, moved to Rhode Island from Quebec as teenagers to work in the mills, and Yvette and Ray spoke French as their first language. And, like most families in the neighborhood, the Doirons were also very involved in their Catholic church. They went to mass every weekend, Yvette was the leader of the parish’s Girl Scout troop and a Eucharistic minister, the boys were altar servers, the girls taught Catechism class, Ray was the parish sextant and sang in the choir. St. Ann’s Church on Cumberland Street was less than ten blocks from the Doiron household, and those blocks were heavily trodden by the fourteen feet that resided in the red and white house.

So it was only natural, when the Diocese of Providence announced in 2000 that it was closing St. Ann due to dwindling parishioners and rising building maintenance costs, that the Doirons would get involved. “They didn’t close this church without a fight, let me tell you,” says Sue, the second-oldest Doiron sibling, thirty-seven. “Though we didn’t get as far as chaining ourselves to the church.” What the family and a handful of other former parishioners have done, however, will probably have a much more lasting impact on the fate of St. Ann’s than any short-lived stunt might have had.

One way or another, St. Ann’s was going to be torn down. Either the Diocese would have dismantled it and sold the pieces – “they could have made a lot of money selling the marble,” says Sue –or they would have sold the whole parcel to developers, who likely would wrecked the church to build condominiums or a shopping plaza. A scrappy group of former parishioners hatched the idea of “a major center, a tourist attraction, a place of opportunity for local artists,” says Dominique. In 2001, the non-profit, non-sectarian St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center was born with the Doiron family at the helm. In 2002, the Diocese agreed to lease the building to the group at $1 per year for ninety-nine years. Ninety-nine years is a long time; the group is hoping they’ll last through this winter.

The stretch of Cumberland Street surrounding St. Ann is nondescript, a run-down thoroughfare with a Dunkin’ Donuts, dry cleaners, service station and funeral home, all fronted by big empty parking lots. From the outside, St. Ann’s Church also looks much like any old-fashioned cathedral on any run-down main street in any aging former mill town. Behind the building’s giant wooden doors, however, is the church’s sanctuary, a room so magnificent that it literally takes your breath away.

Smothered in color and light, the sanctuary is ringed by forty-eight elaborate stained glass windows. Its sixty-five foot vaulted ceiling and half of its walls – 20,000 square feet in all – are covered in buon-style frescoes, paintings whose pigments are integrated into the plaster itself and whose angels, prophets, saints and devils throb with brilliant color. Standing underneath them, head tipped back, you almost want to take chunks of the delicious scenes in your mouth and suck on them like hard candy, or climb into them and lie in the grass and pick flowers. Each of the individual paintings is a masterpiece, but the effect of them together is literally stunning. It’s as if a whole world is in this one room. You could spend a lifetime and never see it all.

BOUNDED TO THE NORTH BY THE Massachusetts border and to the east and west by North Smithfield and Cumberland, Woonsocket has the dubious distinction of having one of the lowest per-capita household incomes in the state, trailing only Central Falls and pockets of Providence. “Woonsocket,” says Dominique with a laugh, “has come to be known as the armpit of the state.”

It wasn’t always this way. The late 1800s and early 1900s was a boom time for towns along the Blackstone River, the epicenter of America’s industrial heyday. Woonsocket grew up around Woonsocket Falls, whose thirty-foot drop generated power for the town’s forty or so textile mills. Meanwhile, farmers in the countryside of Quebec were finding it harder to eke a living out of the land, and word spread about the many jobs in New England’s textile mills. By the time Woonsocket was incorporated in 1888, more than 40 percent of the city’s population – some 8,500 people – was composed of French-Canadian mill workers and their families.

Woonsocket’s French-Canadians were deeply religious people and the Catholic Church was the heart of their community. In 1890, with the city’s only French parish, Precious Blood, bursting at the seams, church officials decided to create a new parish. Members of the new St. Ann’s parish envisioned a magnificent building and began knocking on doors and digging deeper into their pockets at Sunday mass to build it. “This was a parish of poor immigrants, of French-Canadian mill workers who were really devoted to their faith, and wanted to build a temple for themselves,” says Dominique. The nickels and dimes started adding up, and by 1917, the French Renaissance-style church on Cumberland Street was completed.

In 1920, looking towards the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the parish, congregants decided to replace the church’s enormous windows with stained glass. Once again, the parishioners dug into their pockets. Plays were staged as benefits. Some of the wealthier parishioners donated the cost of windows as memorials to family members. The windows, shipped from Chartres, France, were installed in 1925. The centerpieces are two windows on either side of the transept, which are so large that, were they laid end-to-end, their square footage would exceed that of the floor plan of an average ranch-style house. Portraying the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, what makes these windows exceptional is their multilayered artwork. In the foreground of “The Crucifixion,” for example, are kneeling worshippers and Roman soldiers on horseback. Jesus on the cross rises from their midst. In an ordinary stained-glass window, behind this scene might be decorative colored panels. In this one, the scene is backed by the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. Behind the walls, the hills. And behind the hills, a frightfully churning purple sky. The windows face north and south such that “The Resurrection” is always the brightest window in the building.

Nineteen-forty marked the parish’s 50th anniversary, and St. Ann’s pastor decided that the church’s interior should be decorated in honor of the upcoming golden jubilee. Father Henry Morin had always admired the paintings at St. Matthew’s Church in Central Falls, and he invited the artist, Guido Nincheri, to visit St. Ann’s. Nincheri, who lived in Quebec, had been raised in Florence, Italy, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there. He was best-known for his stained glass, but he was an accomplished artist in many media, including painting, mosaic, sculpture, and the Renaissance method of fresco painting known as buon fresco. Michelangelo used this method to paint the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican. During Nincheri’s initial visit to St. Ann’s, he noticed that the walls and the ceiling were still unfinished, covered with cement stucco and not plaster. Father Morin was apologetic. Nincheri was delighted.

Instead of applying oil or tempera to pre-existing plaster, fresco pigments are applied to fresh, wet plaster. The chemical changes which occur mean that the painting is integrated into the wall itself. The moment the pigment touches the plaster, it is permanent. The artist cannot remove paint, or paint over anything he has already done. If he makes a mistake, the plaster must be cut away from the entire area and the process must begin again.

The result is that the paintings never fade. They never chip or peel. And the colors are so rich and bright, they look like they’re glowing. “If you come back 400 years from now,” says Dominique, “these colors will be as bright and vibrant as they are now.”

Over the course of eight years, from 1940 to 1948, Nincheri painstakingly covered the entire church with frescoes. He used the congregants as models for his work, integrating more than 400 individual faces into the paintings’ 175 scenes. One of the centerpieces, “The Last Judgment” depicts three devils being cast into hell, two of whom face us. When the time came to paint the devils’ faces, Nincheri went across the street to St. Ann’s school, and asked for the two naughtiest boys in the class. The nun who serenaded Nincheri while he worked is immortalized as Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of Church Music, playing the organ over the choir loft.

Roger Nincheri, the artist’s grandson, is cataloguing his grandfather’s artwork, which can be found in 220 churches throughout North America. “I consider St Ann’s to be Guido’s Sistine Chapel, in terms of the size and complexity,” he says. Dominique agrees. “If you take [all of Michelangelo’s frescoes in] the Sistine Chapel as a single piece, this is bigger. By a lot. People spend thousands of dollars to go to Italy, but here it is, in this country, in Rhode Island, right in Woonsocket…It’s part of our heritage. Our ancestors came here and built it.”

IT’S WEDNESDAY, BINGO NIGHT at St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center, and though it’s only 4:40, the church basement is already half-full. The mostly elderly crowd is lining up their bingo daubers like many-colored soldiers on the tables, and hunkering down over baskets of French fries and games of cards.

Bingo is just one of the many offerings on the calendar. The building is open from 1 pm until 4 pm every Sunday afternoon for tours. The organization tries to offer at least one event each month. Some notable recent performers were Elisabeth von Trapp, the Vienna Boys’ Choir, the Community College of Rhode Island chorus and orchestra, and the Ocean State Summer Pops Orchestra. A production of Carousel is slated for May, and the Providence Singers are performing Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers” in June. Ultimately, the organization hopes to use some of the un-frescoed part of the sanctuary as gallery space for local artists, and to host weekly events that serve as an anchor for the Center’s calendar, such as a Sunday afternoon piano recital series. When he’s really thinking big, Dominique envisions removing the pews so the sanctuary can be used for weddings, banquets and balls.

The word is not out yet, however, and Center events are not always well attended. When von Trapp performed, it drew 100 people; in a room that seats 1200, “it doesn’t look like there’s anyone there,” says Dominique. Even when the Vienna Boys’ Choir visited, he recalls, “there were only about five or six hundred people, which wasn’t enough to pay the bill of bringing them in.”

Part of the problem is the church’s location. The old joke about having to pack a bag to travel from Providence to Warwick has some truth to it; Rhode Islanders are notoriously reluctant to travel more than a stone’s throw from home. What’s more, says Dominique, “it’s hard to get people to Woonsocket because they still think of it as a burned out town with nothing to do.”

Ticket prices are very reasonable. Events are usually pay-what-you-can, and the most expensive to date were $10. Ironically, however, this may deter visitors accustomed to performances at Providence’s Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium or other such posh venues. “There might be people who think that ten dollars isn’t going to get you much,” says Sue.

Bingo brings in about $1,000 each week, which was just enough to cover the building’s heat and electricity in 2004. Given the rising cost of oil, however, Ray says that this winter will decide whether the organization can stay afloat. St. Ann’s needs more than to just stay afloat, however; major structural repairs are necessary. The building has four different kinds of roof – slate, copper, rubber, and gravel – and all of them need to be repaired or replaced. The roof in the building’s north tower is leaking, which has destroyed some of the decorative stonework on the outside and some fresco work on the inside. The entire heating and electrical systems need to be overhauled. Right now the Doirons and a core group of 20 volunteers do all of the work, but most of it is band-aid work, like patching leaks. They need more volunteers, and they need more money, fast. According to a building survey, the necessary repairs and upgrades will cost an estimated $3.5 million.

The organization has received some funding from the Rhode Island Foundation, the City of Woonsocket and Preserve Rhode Island, among others. Recently, Lowe’s and the National Trust for Historic Preservation awarded a $100,000 grant that the center will use to repair the slate roof in order to preserve the frescoes, which are starting to show signs of water damage. Senator Jack Reed has secured a $300,000 federal appropriation which will become available sometime in the next year. But St. Ann’s has lost out on at least as many grants as it has secured, and its finances are increasingly precarious, meaning that the $300,000 may arrive too late.

“The premise of the lease is that we would be solely responsible for the building as long as our organization was in existence,” says Ray. But this guardianship causes a Catch-22; before they will allocate repair funds, many grantors require a building’s owner to take financial responsibility for unforeseen costs associated with the project. Because the building is owned by the Diocese, the organization cannot agree to these terms, and therefore is ineligible for the funds. Further, many grantmaking organizations will not fund religiously-affiliated organizations. Although the St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center is technically not religiously affiliated, “every piece of art in this building has a religious theme,” says Sue. That the building is owned by the Diocese does not help.

“We’re sort of hoping some of our programming will become more successful,” says Dominique, acknowledging that “it still may not be enough to cover the costs” of keeping the building open. Beyond that, the organization does not have much of a plan to get through the winter. Still, Dominique describes the mood among the organizations’ members as “nervously optimistic.” Nickels and dimes built the church, Sue reminds him, and nickels and dimes will save it.

Brown Alumni Magazine>Radio Heads

Radio Heads
In 1936 two Brown students strung copper wire around campus and invented college radio. Seventy years later, two stations—WBRU and Brown Student Radio—are still fighting over what it meant

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January/February 2006

They were just a couple of troublemakers. George Abraham ’40 and David Borst ’40 may have had many later personal and professional successes, but they will always be remembered in campus circles as the founders of college radio. In 1936, the pair could be seen stringing wires through campus steam tunnels and over the roofs of dorms.

Deans reprimanded them for this unauthorized scrambling, and groundskeepers complained that the copper wires they’d strung tended to spark in the treetops whenever it rained. To Abraham and Borst the trouble was worth it, though: within a year, students in any Brown dorm who owned a radio could tune it to 570 AM and listen to the Brown Network’s two-watt signal—the first student-owned-and-operated college station. It broadcast its first live event that same year: the inauguration of President Henry Merritt Wriston. By 1939 the station was selling air time to local merchants for $3.50 a minute.

That was then. Nowadays, the Brown Network’s grandchild, WBRU, blasts 20,000 watts from its Benevolent Street studios. Today 200,000 people regularly listen to a steady beat of commercial rock and local news programming by tuning to 95.5 FM. The station, whose annual operating budget is $2.7 million, employs ten full-time paid professionals and eighty unpaid student staffers, who are joined by as many as 100 interns. Many WBRU alumni have become successful journalists. Ralph Begleiter ’71, who was world affairs correspondent for CNN for almost two decades, calls his time at the station “career defining.” ESPN’s Chris Berman ’77, one of the country’s best-known sportscasting personalities and a former WBRU sports director, says, “I still look fondly to my days as the voice of Brown football.” Benjamin Weiser ’76, a reporter at the New York Times, describes his journalism training as “all BRU.” And Monica Brady-Myerov ’89, a reporter at WBUR, one of Boston’s two NPR affiliates, says, “What I learned at BRU gave me the foundation of what I do today.” According to Elaine Kim ’06, the station’s current general manager, “BRU has really become a learning workshop in commercial radio.”

The problem, according to today’s campus troublemakers, is that word commercial. They argue that, like many college radio stations, WBRU has abandoned the independent, adventurous spirit of Abraham and Borst in favor of something more homogenized and tame. (Abraham died in 1995, Borst in 2000.) College radio, they believe, should be an alternative to commercial radio, “an unslick, spit-and-baling-wire affair,” in the words of music writer Douglas Wolk. “The point of college radio,” he recently wrote on the online magazine Slate, “is that you get to hear things you didn’t already know about. And that means it’s one of the last few parts of American media that still has the power to surprise.”

The station closest to the spirit of what college radio should be, according to some BRU critics, is BSR, Brown Student Radio, which is operated from a ragged studio in Faunce House. Like WBRU, BSR traces its beginnings back to Abraham and Borst. In 1966, long after the Brown Network had become WBRU-AM, the University helped some of the station’s leaders raise enough money to buy an FM license. It financed the start of the commercial WBRU-FM as a nonprofit corporation financially and legally separate from Brown. In 1966 the license cost about $30,000; it’s worth between $12 million and $15 million today.

After the split, WBRU-AM limped along, its dim signal audible in only a handful of dorms. Nine years ago students decided to solve the problem by working out an arrangement to broadcast on WELH-FM, 88.1, the station owned by the nearby Wheeler School. WBRU-AM became Brown Student Radio, and although students sometimes refer to it as WBSR, the FCC frowns on the practice, because the group does not have an FCC license of its own.

Ten years ago, Borst returned to campus to meet with BSR staffers about the group’s survival—a kind of imprimatur that helped fuel its self-image as Brown’s only true college radio operation. BSR fans argue that Borst’s true heirs are people like Paul McCarthy ’02, the self-described crazy uncle and former general manager of BSR. McCarthy, at twenty-seven, is tall and slim, with dark messy hair and the tough yet sensitive look of an indie rocker. He grew up in Berkeley, California, a magnet for left-of-center personalities and a nexus of independent radio. KPFA, the country’s first community-supported radio station, is based there, as is Free Radio Berkeley, a large and well-known pirate radio outfit.

After the split, WBRU-AM limped along, its dim signal audible in only a handful of dorms. Nine years ago students decided to solve the problem by working out an arrangement to broadcast on WELH-FM, 88.1, the station owned by the nearby Wheeler School. WBRU-AM became Brown Student Radio, and although students sometimes refer to it as WBSR, the FCC frowns on the practice, because the group does not have an FCC license of its own.

Ten years ago, Borst returned to campus to meet with BSR staffers about the group’s survival—a kind of imprimatur that helped fuel its self-image as Brown’s only true college radio operation. BSR fans argue that Borst’s true heirs are people like Paul McCarthy ’02, the self-described crazy uncle and former general manager of BSR. McCarthy, at twenty-seven, is tall and slim, with dark messy hair and the tough yet sensitive look of an indie rocker. He grew up in Berkeley, California, a magnet for left-of-center personalities and a nexus of independent radio. KPFA, the country’s first community-supported radio station, is based there, as is Free Radio Berkeley, a large and well-known pirate radio outfit.

After the split, WBRU-AM limped along, its dim signal audible in only a handful of dorms. Nine years ago students decided to solve the problem by working out an arrangement to broadcast on WELH-FM, 88.1, the station owned by the nearby Wheeler School. WBRU-AM became Brown Student Radio, and although students sometimes refer to it as WBSR, the FCC frowns on the practice, because the group does not have an FCC license of its own.

Ten years ago, Borst returned to campus to meet with BSR staffers about the group’s survival—a kind of imprimatur that helped fuel its self-image as Brown’s only true college radio operation. BSR fans argue that Borst’s true heirs are people like Paul McCarthy ’02, the self-described crazy uncle and former general manager of BSR. McCarthy, at twenty-seven, is tall and slim, with dark messy hair and the tough yet sensitive look of an indie rocker. He grew up in Berkeley, California, a magnet for left-of-center personalities and a nexus of independent radio. KPFA, the country’s first community-supported radio station, is based there, as is Free Radio Berkeley, a large and well-known pirate radio outfit.

McCarthy arrived at Brown in 1997 after a year spent working at UC Berkeley’s KALX, and he didn’t like what he heard on WBRU, where DJs play songs from predetermined playlists designed to maximize the number of listeners and advertising dollars. At WBRU, McCarthy points out, there are at least as many students working in marketing as in programming. The other option was BSR, which, according to Daniel Oppenheim ’98, BSR’s general manager at the time, was still broadcasting as WBRU-AM out of a minimally updated version of Borst and Abraham’s “leaky pipe” system out to a “very small, if not nonexistent, listenership.” Nevertheless, Oppenheim says, WBRU-AM had a history of “campus-focused, community-oriented radio,” and that was more McCarthy’s style.

McCarthy and Oppenheim teamed up with the goal of getting the most out of the recently completed WELH arrangement. They worked out a deal allowing BSR to broadcast on WELH from 7 p.m. to 2 p.m., Monday through Saturday. That block of time is now chock-full of what might be called typical college radio fare: a mishmash of musical genres and formats, experimental audio, call-in shows, news, features, and sports. Tune in to 88.1 and you might hear “antifascist forms of aural expression” (as one show is described in BSR’s fall programming guide), a call-in show about bicycle repair, the Square Dance Disaster Hour, or live analysis of the Brown football game. In the station’s online archives, you might stumble upon an interview with your favorite indie rocker, but because most interviews are conducted over the phone, the sound quality is likely to be terrible and the interview painfully awkward.

This kind of approach may fit squarely into the stereotypical—and romantic—image of student-run radio stations of the past three decades, but the world around these stations has changed drastically. As Douglas Wolk pointed out in his Slate article, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, Soundgarden, the Clash, and the Smiths are among the bands that got their start as college-radio-station favorites. But thanks to business trends in the music industry, crossing over from indie labels and college airplay to major record companies and commercial airplay is much more difficult. Even BSR is trying to find a middle ground, where, in McCarthy’s words, the product can be “challenging and inventive and imaginative” but still of a high enough quality that people actually tune in.

One example is Inside Out, which McCarthy founded as “an audiozine focusing on Rhode Island voices.” The show was on the air for six semesters, thanks to a Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities grant, and tackled such topics as Cape Verdeans in Rhode Island, the blurry line between public and private spaces, and the local alternative high school the Met. More recently, BSR students have produced Off the Beat, a newsmagazine about local events, and Not Your Classroom, in which professors from Rhode Island colleges talk about their work.

The approach is beginning to bear fruit. Inside Out’s Nathaniel James ’01 won a third-place Radio Feature award from the Society of Professional Journalists in 2000 for his piece, “Rocco’s Used Furniture and Things.” McCarthy says WRNI, Rhode Island’s NPR affiliate, will begin airing Not Your Classroom in February. And recent BSR alumni a