About Youth Portraits

Youth Portraits seeks to give voice to young people who have been in prison -- to give them the tools to tell their own stories, to teach them an important set of skills, and to empower them to speak up about their own experiences.

The eight-month program was an educational partnership between Sound Portraits Productions and Friends of the Island Academy, a community-based organization that provides educational and counseling services to young people after their release from Rikers Island. Through the program, five young people from Friends worked side by side with Sound Portraits producers to create short documentaries about their lives. The pieces premiered in October 2001 at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City and were broadcast on WNYC in January 2002.

Youth Portraits participants at the Friends of Island Academy.

Under the direction of Sound Portraits producer Stacy Abramson (with support from independent radio producer Susan Burton and educational consultant Lisa Cowan), participants learned to digitally record their interviews and edit their work using ProTools. The resulting short pieces are personal, intimate stories -- stories that only the students could tell.

Sound Portraits's partner in the program, the Friends of the Island Academy, was founded in 1989 by the first principal at the public high school on Rikers Island and is devoted to breaking the cycle of return to Rikers. Based in midtown Manhattan, it works with 350 young people each year -- boys and girls, ages 10 - 21 -- upon their release from Rikers or other juvenile detention facilities. The average rate of recidivism for young people coming out of Rikers is 70 percent. For those who participate in Friends of the Island programs, that rate drops to 17 percent. It is one of the only organizations of its kind.

You can read more about Youth Portraits in the New York Times, New York Daily News, and Teacher Magazine.

Youth Portraits was made possible by: the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, RealNetworks, Open Society Institute, New York Community Trust, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Glaser Family Foundation.