A New College program and puppets give Osceola County inmates second chances

SARASOTA, Fla. - In an unconventional approach to prison rehabilitation, New College of Florida researchers and students are using custom-built puppets to teach vital job interview skills to incarcerated men and women.

Osceola County inmate workshop

What we know:

Dr. Tyler Fisher and undergraduate students Jones Hogsed and Alicia Byrne teamed up with the performing arts non-profit Open Scene to deliver "The Art of Interviewing: Voice, Vision, Vocation" to the Osceola County Corrections Department. 

Funded by a Community Impact Grant from United Arts of Central Florida, the program recently ran bilingual four-week workshops in English and Spanish.

Inmates craft custom puppets out of soft foam and felt using interchangeable features in non-human colors to avoid racial connotations. 

Participants create distinct career personas—such as an aspiring truck driver, dog kennel owner, or asphalt foreman—to practice mock job interviews. The puppet acts as a psychological buffer, so any critique during the practice interview is directed at the puppet rather than the person.

Former student Leah Basaria, who started the program with Dr. Fisher, also launched a non-profit, Light Line Reentry, to track inmate success after release.

Public library exhibit

What's next:

Inmates' custom puppets are on display at the Hart Memorial Central Library, the main branch of the Osceola Library System in Kissimmee. 

Organizers designed the exhibition as a positive display of self-portraits to offer the public a humanizing alternative to a traditional mugshot.

Jim Henson Foundation praises project 

What they're saying:

The Jim Henson Foundation praised the project's creative impact.

"We're truly inspired by your work," the foundation stated. "It's clear that your project is both innovative and compassionate. We are always eager to learn about socially engaged puppetry projects like yours and to celebrate the ways artists are expanding the reach and relevance of the form. Your work sits at a vital intersection of creativity and advocacy."

Students and faculty emphasize the human element of the program.

"Too often we think about inmates as a number, as someone who has messed up, made wrong choices, and yet here it displays them as here is there puppet personas, they are creative, they have a lot of potential, and they are ready to get back to work," Fisher said.

"It makes me feel really happy that I’m able to be a part of that," Byrne said. "I know how difficult these things can be, and I’m glad that we were able to be there for them and help them reenter the workforce afterward in hopes that they can start a new chapter."

"I really think that these puppets display a kind of value in humanity’s discourse of immoral imagination in which the individual imagines the potential self he or she wants to be and then orients their ethical code around that to become that individual," Hogsed said. "That’s what we are doing with these puppets to ask the inmates to have unlimited capacity to imagine the role that they want to play in society once they are released."

Sarasota