Ira Glass This American Life-- I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "Unteachable Moment," stories about people who are supposed to learn some stuff that is really hard to learn, and then what happens instead of learning. We've arrived at Act Two of our show-- Act Two, Throw the Book at Them. In New Orleans, the district attorney prosecutes a ton of kids as adults. Between 2011 and 2015, for instance, he sent approximately 80% of 15- and 16-year-olds into the adult criminal justice system in cases where he had the option of charging them as juveniles. That's according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. These kids end up at the Orleans Justice Center, which is the jail that any adult in New Orleans Parish is held while waiting for trial. And in part because there are so many kids, and in part because some of them are in jail for so long, waiting for their court dates, they decided to open up a high school in the jail back last year in August. It's a real school, actually part of the New Orleans School District. You can get a real high school diploma there. And it looks like nearly any high school, too.

Teacher So gentlemen, I'm about to hand you these note cards. These are the--

Ira Glass In the hallway, there are motivational posters and student essays on the theme of power posted. There's a "Where are they now?" display with former students' pictures and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mugshot from when he was in jail. But one big difference from regular school? The students are all in orange jumpsuits, stamped "INMATE" in all caps.

Teacher What do parallel lines tell us?

Student What you mean, what they tell us?

Teacher There's some information we can take from parallel lines, that we love about parallel lines.

Ira Glass At any given time, there are about 50 students enrolled in the school, which is named the Travis Hill School after a local musician who was incarcerated himself as a teenager. I should say that some of the students are 18 or over. So technically, they are adults. But Travis Hill is different from schools in juvenile detention facilities because these kids, all of them, are charged as adults. They're all facing adult sentences, lots of them really long-- 10, 15, 25, 40 years-- and a lifelong criminal record. And all this raises a very particular problem for this school. Eli Hager, who reports on criminal justice issues at the Marshall Project, has been visiting the school. Quick warning that we have un-beeped a few words here in the podcast version of the program. A beeped version is at our website. Here's Eli.

Eli Hager The problem is, being a student and being an inmate are opposites. Everything about adult jail is telling you to be hopeless, that you have no future and no worth, which makes school feel utterly beside the point. Of course, there are always kids in the back row of any classroom asking the question, when will we ever use this in real life? Especially in places where there truly isn't much opportunity, like at the mostly black schools that the kids at Travis Hill all came from. But it's just more vivid here, the students' sense of the senselessness of school-- more total and more justified. Take this one kid, Ju'ron. He's 17 years old, and he's facing 15 to 104 years in prison for allegedly stealing a cell phone from a woman and firing a gun in the air. He says he didn't do it. His mom can't afford bail. So until his trial, he's stuck in a place that's not safe. The death rate at the Orleans Justice Center is four times the national average for jails. Ju'ron calls his mom every day, but in-person visits aren't allowed here. Sometimes, he gets locked in his cell for 23 hours a day and gets his feed up, as the guards call it, through a slot. He goes to sleep on a hard slab. And one day, on his way to art class, he walked past the man charged with killing his father just a few months earlier.

Ju'ron I was scared. He'd killed a man that looked like me. So I was glad he didn't see me. But I saw him. Now I know to keep an eye out.

Eli Hager Do you remember how you were feeling when you were sitting in class after having just seen that person?

Ju'ron I was thinking, just thinking. I wasn't going nowhere-- in my head, no, no, no. I was like, am I tripping? I gotta get the fuck out of here. I can't do this no more. There's all type of stuff coming with jail, man. I can't do it. School's not helping me. I mean, they're doing their thing. They're trying to help. They're trying hard. You know, I give school their prop, but it's not helping. What, I'm gonna face that by using math? Really?

Eli Hager So last summer, the experiment began at Orleans Justice Center. Could a violent adult jail contain an aspirational school? Every day, its students, all of whom are black, would grapple with whether they're defined by their classroom or their cell. In the first year of Travis Hill's existence, there were two moments in particular that illustrated how the kids there deal with this bewildering code switch-- inmate to student, student to inmate. The first was this story that kept coming up in almost every interview I did. It was about this kid, Quincy, also 17 years old-- the kind of legendary kid who everyone at a high school still talks about, even though he's no longer there. Ju'ron lived on the same tier of the jail with him.

Ju'ron Everybody knew Quincy, you know? Quincy, he was just that person. He was just the type of dude, when you come on the tier, he'll try to talk to you, try to jose with you.

Eli Hager Jose is slang in Louisiana. It sort of means joke, like mess around. Though Quincy didn't really do much school work himself, he'd stand up in class and imitate motivational speakers from YouTube, telling the other kids to do their work. That kind of thing left a big impression on the staff.

Teacher 1 He was a calm and cool kid.

Teacher 2 He was very, very intelligent. Very intelligent. Very, very intelligent-- just, sorry, I had to stress that.

Teacher 3 Well, he just had a charisma about him where he's like, you know?

Teacher 1 He was a leader of the tier.

Teacher 2 If somebody new comes on the unit, somebody wants to go pick on this person or that, Quincy may say, hey, nah, leave that man alone. That man chilling.

Eli Hager Quincy wasn't at the jail anymore by the time I visited, so you're not going to hear from him. Part of the reason everyone knew him so well was that he'd been waiting behind bars for two years to get a trial. When he was 15, he was charged as an adult with attempted murder for shooting a gun at state troopers in an unmarked car, along with a group of other teens. Every time he had a court date, he got a ride over to the courthouse in a van. The older kids have to take a school bus, of all vehicles, even though it's only like 500 feet away from the jail. He'd wait in the van in shackles to be called into the courtroom, only to have his case continued again. And then he'd just roll back to school and try to do trigonometry, or whatever.

Kenneth Dorsey Quincy was in a situation with his case that kept getting put off, and put off, and put off, and put off.

Eli Hager This is Travis Hill's dean of students, Kenneth Dorsey.

Kenneth Dorsey So there's a lot of-- he wasn't interested in doing school. He came, he did a little bit, but then he's off doing something else mentally. And I got to believe it has to do with the fact of what the case was doing to him.

Eli Hager The day that Quincy finally got to stand in front of a judge was a major event for the entire student body. There had been so much buildup. And in the group claustrophobia of a school in jail, one student's court date feels like everybody's court date. Ju'ron told me and my producer, Sean Cole, what it was like on the juvenile tier beforehand.

Ju'ron Everybody, we all got in a circle. We were praying he got good news, you know?

Sean Cole You got in a circle and prayed?

Ju'ron Yeah, we always do that.

Eli Hager Every time somebody has a big court situation coming up, you do that?

Ju'ron Yeah, we pray. They pray. I just be standing by and watching. But at the time, I was praying with them. So he was like, man, I'm going home tomorrow. It was like, yeah, you going home tomorrow. We were not trying to jinx it. Then he came back, threw his food on the table.

Eli Hager Quincy had come back from court and just threw his food on the table. They were all at lunch.

Ju'ron I was like, what happened, bro? He was like, I got fucking 25 years. Just like, damn. And everybody just started crying.

Eli Hager 25 years for someone charged at 15 years old. It was the longest sentence handed down in Travis Hill's short history.

Eli Hager And what was your first class after that?

Ju'ron Art.

Eli Hager Art.

Ju'ron And everybody was just sad, you know? Nobody wasn't doing no work. Everybody had their head down, just thinking, listening to music about sentencing, you know, just to relate to.

Eli Hager Music about sentencing?

Ju'ron Music about jail and getting sentenced, people turning their back on you, and all that. It's just music about that. That's what we like to listen to, because we can relate.

Sean Cole Which songs were you listening to in that class?

Ju'ron We was listening to YFN Lucci, "Turn They Back On Me." [MUSIC - YFN LUCCI, "TURN THEY BACK"]

Eli Hager This is another student, Marlin.

Marlin Yeah, 'cause the teachers here had put on this song by YFN Lucci, "Turn Your Back." And when we heard that, the whole class just broke down in tears with him. Like, we just were broke down for that whole class period, just crying. I was crying like a babe. And I just felt his pain, like-- yeah, I felt his pain.

Yfn Lucci Let me know if you feel my pain, yeah.

Ju'ron Listening to the song--

Eli Hager Ju'ron again.

Ju'ron --just zoning out, not listening to nothing the teacher had to say. Nobody was listening to her. It was just a sad moment for our juvenile tier.

Sean Cole Was she trying to teach the class anyway?

Ju'ron Yeah, she was trying to teach, you know? Same shit, trying to get our mind off it. But how can get your mind off of something like that?

Eli Hager What about fifth period that day? What did you have next?

Ju'ron Science, same thing.

Eli Hager Same thing? You had science, and she was trying to teach also?

Ju'ron It was like that until he went to DCI that Tuesday.

Eli Hager DCI is the Dixon Correctional Institute. In the days before Quincy got sent off, even though this goes against the whole point of their school, the teachers decided that he was facing too bleak a future to try to get him to study. So they just let him listen to music, and sat and had conversations with him, talking about how he'd be as old as they are when he got out.

Ju'ron It felt like to see that they would give a young person our age 25 years, you think they're really going to give a fuck about us, being the same age? Then we're black. They don't got no white people on our tier. It just looked like we was out for failure. Everybody makes mistakes. That's why I was depressed. I felt like nobody was safe.

Eli Hager And you felt like they were basically saying that his life didn't have any worth, because they were just-- he was only 17 years old, and they were giving him 25 years. Is that kind of what it felt like?

Ju'ron I think so. Yeah, basically.

Eli Hager But you're saying that his life did have a lot of worth.

Ju'ron Yeah, his life had a lot of worth.

Eli Hager Why does his life and your life have worth?

Ju'ron Because we're young. We ain't even turned 18 yet. We have still a lot of growing to do. We got changes we can make, you know? Stuff that we can do to change our life, and all that. But once you mess up for once, it's going to cost you the rest of your life. I ain't saying he got life in jail, but 25 years, that's a lot. That's more than a lot. After that, I don't know. That really killed me. When Quincy got sent 25 years, that killed my hopes of getting out.

Eli Hager A lot of the other kids felt the same way. The math teacher, Ms. Burr, and the other teachers, say that even months later, their students still haven't fully come to terms with Quincy's departure. They still bring him up.

Ms. Burr Literally, I think on Monday, they asked about him, and brought him up, and talked about him.

Eli Hager And what did they say to you?

Ms. Burr What they said was, well, what if I got time like Quincy? What's the point of this education if I'm getting time like him? Then this is a waste of my time. There's no point, because in 25 years-- that's 25 years. I'm not using this. And so then I brought up the way that Quincy left, and how he was like, I know education is important. I want to pursue my education. And they were like, wait, really? He said that? And I was like, yeah, he said that.

Eli Hager I was at the jail visiting around the time Quincy and another student were sentenced. And I sat in on this one science class where their friends were downright despondent. One was walking around the room, groaning and knocking his head against the door. The teacher was trying to teach a lesson about the properties of living organisms. A living organism needs light, she said, and energy. A living organism needs to live within a community. A living organism responds to stimuli or messages from the environment around it. A living organism has the capacity to grow. When Quincy was shipped upstate, it was probably the lowest moment for the kids. Their most hopeful moment came just a month later. It had to do with another student who nearly everyone at the school talked about and another first at Travis Hill, but of a very different kind. It was the first graduation-- a graduation ceremony for one, one student. A whole ceremony was held for him. The graduate was a kid named Tristion. But people don't call him Tristion.

Tristion I have everybody call me Fireman.

Eli Hager OK.

Tristion You know, jail give you nicknames. Like, call me Fireman. That's my childhood dream.

Eli Hager Oh.

Tristion So I think it was in school, you know, we had to sing a song, "Firetrucks are Red," R-E-D. And then I look. I'm liking it. I'm liking what it's looking like. Then every Halloween, from young to a certain age limit, I dressed as a firefighter.

Eli Hager You were a fireman every single Halloween?

Tristion Every single Halloween.

Eli Hager That's good. You're consistent.

Tristion has the word "fireman" written in Sharpie on the collar of his orange jumpsuit and down its leg. In addition to fighting fires, he wants to start a storm evacuation business. He grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward. And like most of the kids at Travis Hill, he's one of the babies of Hurricane Katrina. Like Ju'ron, he fled to Texas until the water went down. He says his high school class was going to be the first to graduate from a brand new school building that had just been built. But then he came to jail. When Tristion was a juvenile, he coerced underage girls online to send him naked photos. He says he knew it was wrong when he was doing it and that he stopped about a year before he was arrested, at age 18. Tristion is not at all the typical student at Travis Hill. He came to jail before the school existed and was already studying to get his GED, already motivated.

Tristion But then Travis Hill came along. Woo! It was a big game changer. We had classes-- like, real periods. The transitioning, the time up, time to switch and stuff, really gave me that feeling, like I was really in school. I'm like, man, I think I'm going to love this.

Eli Hager Tristion said school was like having a huge breakfast waiting for him in the morning, with eggs, and grits, and biscuits, and sausage, and orange juice. Meanwhile, his actual breakfast the first morning of school was cereal. It was cereal the next morning, too, and the next. Jail is dispiriting like that, demotivating. And Tristion was bent on staying motivated. So instead of fixating on being in jail, he takes another approach.

Tristion I try to put that "I'm in a jail facility" to the side.

Eli Hager How do you do that?

Tristion I do it mentally, of course. I look, and I just picture myself in a real class setting. Even though I have to go back to the tier, I don't look at going back to the tier as going home. I look at going back to the tier as, like, you know, just going to this park.

Sean Cole A park-- like a city park?

Tristion Yes, like a city park. You're around a bunch of people you don't really know. You don't know why they're there. But you just know you're surrounded by a bunch of random people. And another thing I programmed in my head, because I want to go to the military also-- I said, by us having all of the same color on, this is boot camp. This is training. This is a training facility. It's not a jail facility. This is a training facility. This is training me to handle being away from family and to be able to better myself. And another way to look at it, if that don't work, I look at it like a hurricane shelter.

Eli Hager A hurricane shelter?

Tristion A hurricane shelter. There's been a bad storm. Everybody's been separated from their people. We're all around, like I said, a bunch of people that you do not know. But you have to survive, and they have the-- they provide the food for you. They come check on you, make sure you follow the rules. Sounds what a hurricane shelter is to me.

Eli Hager This is the way that Tristion deals with going to school in jail-- by pretending he's not in jail. Some of the other students engage in a similar kind of useful delusion, especially during what one teacher calls the honeymoon phase of jail, when the kids are still telling themselves, and anyone who will listen, that they're getting out tomorrow or next week, against all evidence to the contrary. The school does it, too, by having intentionally condensed units and semesters, with award ceremonies at the end of each one, to at least give the students a feeling of accomplishment or completion.

Eli Hager Do you ever get-- do you ever get really down? I mean, it seems like you're very positive. Do you ever get real down?

Tristion I kid you not, only for one minute. I said, man, this ain't no boot camp. This isn't a hurricane-- this is a real jail. Man. But I say, you know what? And I say this to myself all the time-- I'll be talking to myself and I'll be like, jail is not a bad place. Jail is a place to get you to get right.

Eli Hager Do you ever think, wait, this isn't actually a school, this is a jail?

Tristion This is always a school. The only difference is, you have a deputy just standing there, just watching you. And I'm not used to being watched like that. But like I say, the boot camp-- that's my ranking officer. He's making it so I do everything right, make it so I don't mess up, make it so I do this right, just in case I have to go into combat.

Eli Hager Tristion is obviously a pretty enthusiastic guy in general. But when I asked him about his graduation, he talked for seven minutes straight--

Tristion Ooh. Man, big day.

Eli Hager --not just about the event itself, but the moments leading up to it, acting out every part like he was in a one-man show, from getting ready in the morning--

Tristion Lotion, baby powder, brushing my teeth twice, brushing my hair, smelling good.

Eli Hager --to the lunch break that day, hours before the ceremony.

Tristion I eat my food. Let me see, did I eat my food? I did not eat my food, because what we had was not so good. So I just ate the cookies. I sent it back out-- blech, take it.

Eli Hager And he didn't have to do any fantasizing at all when it came to the ceremony itself. It was the real deal, with balloons, speeches. His family was there. All of his classmates were in attendance. And unlike them, instead of orange, Tristion was decked out in a dark green cap and gown.

Tristion We tried to figure out, which side does the tassel go on? And here we go. [HUMMING "POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE"] And just that feeling of everybody looking, smiling. I'm just-- got my little military walk going on.

Sean Cole You're saluting?

Tristion Saluting. I see my grandfather and my mother in the front. And I'm just like, man, this is really big. I get up and do my speech. All right, all right. This selection I selected is about mistakes and consequences, and reads as follows. "While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of these actions. Consequences are governed by natural law. They are out in the circle of--" I glance at my mom. I see the little teardrop right here. She tried to wipe it, but I caught it before she wiped it. I'm like, ah, I seen you. I thought I was going to have-- I thought I was going to cry, which I did later on. My fellow classmates, they were like, man, that's big, son. I want to graduate now.

Eli Hager Ms. Burr, the math teacher, said she heard the same thing from the students.

Ms. Burr It was just like, wait, I can actually get a diploma in here. Like, that's a real thing. And so I think sometimes they think we're just saying stuff. And so seeing those moments, they're just like, wow, this actually is a real place.

Eli Hager It's almost like they--

It took this kid, who lives in an imaginary version of jail, to make the school inside of the jail feel real. But after Tristion's graduation, he had to go back to his cell, diploma in hand. His family had gone home.

Tristion I went back to the dorm. It came, that one minute. Came that one minute of sadness-- like, the feeling of them leaving, and I'm not able to leave with them or follow right behind them. That really took a little chunk out of me. I'm like-- I'm so used to my mama saying, follow me. And for them to walk out the door, that's the last time I'm seeing them until I get out. And I know I can't walk behind them. That was big. And I'm laying down in my bed. I'm like, here I am, back on the tier, graduated. I say, no, I'm not about to do this. I'm not going to do this. I graduated. I'm going to be home soon.

Eli Hager Tristion was sentenced the very next day after his graduation. Last year, he'd asked the court to delay his sentencing until he finished his degree. Now he's at another facility and will be incarcerated until 2021, according to the Louisiana Department of Corrections. One of Travis Hill's staff members, Alexi Gaddis, told the students during a, quote unquote, "life skills" class this spring, that it's already not easy for human beings to dream. It's already a vulnerable thing to believe in yourself, given all the ways the world can crush that. Getting these particular kids to give dreaming another chance, absurd as it can feel in some ways, given what this country thinks of them-- in the end, that's the core curriculum of this school.