The processional music swelled, the guests stood and the graduates filed in wearing caps and gowns of blue and ivory and crimson and gold — one color for each of the Rikers Island jails that held them.
It had the trappings of any graduation. Gold balloons spelled out the year. "Congratulations" up on the walls. The graduates' names scrolled across a screen in the corner of the chapel. And still, security cameras watched from the ceiling and correction officers lined the walls with zip-tie handcuffs on their belts. Their radios crackled under the music.
The theme printed on the program named the gap the day was trying to bridge: “From fracture to future.”
The 57 graduates had earned high school diplomas and GEDs this week through East River Academy, the New York City public school that operates inside the jails as part of the Education Department's District 79. Most were between 18 and 21, though some were later-in-life students.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani came to the island to deliver the keynote.
“Many of you arrived on Rikers in a cloud of uncertainty and despair,” he said. “And yet you did not surrender to that alienation.”
He compared the city, and life itself, to a merry-go-round, full of highs and lows, but always moving: “There is always a seat open for anyone who wants to climb on board. By entering this program, by choosing to hope, by choosing possibility over doubt, you have already chosen to climb on board.”
For most of the graduates, though, graduation wasn’t the end. They are planning their next steps while they wait for plea deals, for trials and for transfers to state prison upstate.
Ivan Maldonado, the class salutatorian, said he had been in and out of Rikers for the past two years. He faces charges of robbery and criminal possession of a weapon, according to city records. He also posted the second-highest GED scores in the class, the mayor said during his speech.
One day, he wants to study mortuary science and open a funeral home, “probably with my name in it, and have a little business with myself.” He guessed the interest just grew out of “a love of crime shows.”
Maldonado's not sure, though, when he’ll be out. Soon, he said, he’ll be transferred to a facility upstate, “and hopefully that's a trip that goes well for me.”
During his speech to the class, Maldonado gave his case number and his cell number. “But that will not always be my life,” he said.
“We are not our booking number, we are not our charges, we are not the worst thing we have ever done. We are proof that change is possible,” Maldonado told his fellow graduates.
Andrew Pashinin, the valedictorian, is being held on an attempted murder charge. Authorities allege he pushed a man onto the subway tracks during a dispute at the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays station in Brooklyn in late 2024 — what Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez described at the time as “alleged, horrifying actions.” The other man was able to pull himself up off the tracks a few seconds before a train entered the station, according to the DA.
Both Pashinin and Maldonado were 19 at the time of the 2024 incidents that led to their arrests, according to reports and law enforcement statements at the time.
Pashinin’s trial is set to begin within weeks. During his 16 months on the island, he said, he has moved through 16 different housing units. The one constant was school.
“For four hours a day, Monday through Friday, my environment was peaceful and constructive,” he said. “It felt like being in a safe haven in the middle of a battlefield. School helped me follow a positive path that eventually led me to this podium.”
He didn't know the jail had a school, he said, until an officer came to his door one morning and told him to get ready. He went, at first, for breakfast — “the best thing I had got in jail.” Then he kept going because he liked the teachers, and because he wanted better grades.
His mother, Heidy Castro, watched from the pews, clear-eyed, but hopeful.
She was “really inspired by all the speakers and what it could mean for him in his life to, not see himself as his mistakes, but what's possible outside of that, which is huge.”
The past 16 months in Rikers, she said, “have been difficult for us. Today seems like a little graduation to all that suffering. Even though he's still here, his mind is different.”
During the ceremony, principal Tonya Threadgill, who has worked at the school for 31 years, looked out at the graduates and acknowledged a class made up overwhelmingly of young “Black and Hispanic males fractured by this 21st century miseducation.”
She invoked Carter G. Woodson's “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” and suggested that the graduates weren’t the only ones who had failed.
“Society will say that these men and women here today in our graduating class have missed the mark, and that they must go to prison for what they've done,” she said. “I encourage everyone here today to take a moment, just take a moment to examine his or her life. We've all missed the mark.”
If anyone in the chapel understood, it was the man who now runs the jails. Stanley Richards, the first formerly incarcerated person to lead the city's Department of Correction, told the graduates he had once sat where they sat.
“When I came to prison,” he said, “I thought that was what life would be all about for me.”
He grew up in the Soundview projects, he said, and dropped out of high school in the ninth grade. He decided to earn his GED, and went on, while incarcerated, to earn a college degree, graduating magna cum laude.
“My mind and my body might have been incarcerated,” he said, “but when I pick up a book, I can go anywhere in the world.”
Richards had done time on Rikers and in prison upstate, he said. During that time, Richards said, he could not have imagined that he would one day lead The Fortune Society, a nonprofit re-entry organization, much less run the jail system that once held him.
“You can be anything you want,” he told them. “Don't believe it simply because I'm saying it. Believe it because I lived it. I lived it, and so could you.”
