Alonzo Scott is on the edge of exploding.

He's standing beside a blackboard, trembling. Four dozen men have just filed into the school tier, the cinder-block and steel cage where Scott lives. They walk past the bunk beds where some of their classmates sleep and settle down in the 20-by-20-foot space that serves as a classroom.

The clang of iron doors slamming echoes off concrete and tile. It's another morning, just like all the other mornings in the Richmond City Jail, where the empty hours and the rumbling undertone of threatened violence make doing time harder than in the toughest state prisons, many inmates say.

This morning, as Scott prepares to teach class for only the third time, there's a moment for hope -- mixed hope that someone might start down a new path, despite the odds, despite the fact that most men here have had that chance before and blown it.

"I'm an inmate, just like you," Scott starts. The flush of a toilet from behind a blue shower curtain interrupts. "I didn't give a [expletive]." Now he yells: "I had to die. The old me had to die in order to learn something."

He lifts his hands and fans the orange certificates he has won as student of the week, a half-dozen in each hand.

He's boasting, but he has something to boast about. In one month, he boosted his score on the pre-GED test by more than 1,000 points to a passing grade.

What about the class? mutters Thomas Billups, a student from the jail's tough F-3 wing.

We'll get to it, Scott says. But first, there's something he has to tell them.

"When I got here, I was just an [expletive]. Like I was before. I had to sit down and listen," Scott says. He's almost shouting now, his hands are shaking.

In response to a question from Billups, disputing whether something Scott wrote on the blackboard is a complete sentence, he jumps up, stands on one of the plastic classroom chairs and argues his point.

"You don't got to listen to me. But you gotta listen to somebody."

. . .

In the early afternoon in the school cell, the sky outside is so blue you can see the color through the unwashed Plexiglas and thick, black mesh over the windows.

Not that anyone's looking.

John Cole is teaching math: multiplying, dividing and adding fractions. The echoing crackle from deputies' radios, the shouting from down the hall, the murmur from the dozen Spanish-speakers across the room trying to learn English -- all of this makes it hard to hear.

On the blackboard beside him, John Fogg draws an elaborate cross section of a human heart, preparing for the biology class he'll teach in a few moments.

In the back, it's time for dreaming.

Fred Johnson, who is awaiting trial on a charge of raping a 13-year-old, leans on a bunk near the classroom. He's planning to take a bricklayer's course, he says. Get back his commercial driver's license, too.

He's got that jailhouse look: head tilted back, smiling, eyes focused on something invisible in the middle distance. He's thinking about the business administration program at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, he adds. A Bible college.

"I'm gonna pass that test," says Demetri York, who lost an eye while yanking kindling out of a box for his mother. He's afraid that when he gets back to the streets, there won't be work for him. If not, "there's gonna be people saying, hey, here's some easy money."

Maybe passing the GED test would help.

"Keep that confidence up," Johnson says.

He and York butt fists.

"That's what I need," York says, turning back to the calculator that Cole has asked him to use to double-check problems on the board.

. . .

Like York, Les Farrar has his spot. It's a battered study carrel, shoved against the bunk beds at a rear corner of the classroom. The top shelf is piled with books. The Vedanta, a Hindu scripture. A collection of biblical apocrypha. A dictionary. An encyclopedia of religion. A volume from the "Left Behind" series of religious novels.

He surrounds himself with a fortress of pages as he tries not to beat himself up with questions about why he's in jail, although he has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of sexual battery. He frowns, wondering what's going to happen to him.

With his college business degree, Farrar was tapped to teach and tutor the inmates on how to manage their money. Between classes, he plunges into his books.

Now, something Fogg said captures him, about how not only exercise but stress and anger make your heart race. Fogg starts to explain about adrenaline.

"We got to know ourselves," Fogg says, speaking more slowly, looking at Farrar. "We need to stop and search deep inside ourselves. Ask what is bothering us.

"We got to stop and search deep."

Fogg does just that a few nights later -- in the cocoonlike space formed by cramming too many bunk beds into too small a space, so there's not quite room for neighbors to sit without their knees touching. He reaches inside and drags out a poem. The words are neatly printed, open circles dotting the i's.

"If only our minds could just see. Interpret," he wrote. "For tomorrow it may be lost. Just as it came."

He wrote about emotions, he explains later. About how men in jail push feelings away, as if afraid of them. It's why, Fogg says, so many turn to drugs. It's why he did. Again.

He'd been clean for a couple of years, had a fiancee, a job. But he had a friend from the old days. The guy was in a jam and owed a dealer $4,000. Fogg figured that was enough to get his friend killed and decided to help him.

The problem was, there were only a couple of ways he knew to raise money quickly. He was arrested and charged with check fraud in February.

"I knew, when I made a decision to help him, I knew I was going back to jail," Fogg says.

There have been too many decisions like that in his life, he says. He spends a lot of time in the school unit, thinking, trying to figure out how to keep from doing that. It's not easy, and he's not confident.

"I'm scared to decide and choose anymore because I'm scared to fail," he says. "So I tend to make a choice that's easy."

. . .

The days after Alonzo Scott led his first classes are rough.

He becomes more and more aggressive, less inclined to do what school program supervisor John Dooley asks of him. Dooley worries, as jail staff always do, that hard words could lead to harder actions.

Meanwhile, there are rumors someone in the unit has hidden a shank, a homemade knife. An anonymous note brings a shakedown, and Scott takes to his bed, blanket wrapped tightly around him. He skips two meals and asks Dooley to bring him a tray from the cafeteria.

But now he's refusing to leave his bed and eat.

Dooley, tired of the sass, orders him to step down the hall. Sullen, head down, hands clasped angrily behind his back, Scott stomps off ahead of the teacher.

The sharp words echo. Dooley asks about the note. Scott doesn't answer. Dooley asks why he isn't eating. He suspects Scott is stoned, probably on another inmate's prescription. But Scott just says he isn't hungry.

"Just let me go back to bed," he mutters.

Dooley's mouth tightens. He asks Scott if he wants to be "Swiss-rolled" -- removed from the school tier and made to roll up his bedding in his mattress, so that it looks like the snack cake.

Scott says he doesn't care. Dooley marches him down the hall, stalks off into his office to write up the order to kick Scott out. Technically, he could write up Scott for disobeying an order, for refusing to answer his questions. That would mean a mandatory 90-day stay in the hole: solitary.

Before Dooley finishes, he calls Jerald "Lucky" Albert, one of the inmate coordinators who helps him run the school program, to have a word with Scott.

No luck.

"He says he's ready to go," Albert reports.

Silently, Dooley and Scott head downstairs to the classification office, which will find a new spot for the inmate in another wing of the jail. Their eyes don't meet.