Rapist’s new home: The hell on earth jail called... TORTURE ISLAND
HIS sprawling new home is surrounded by water and has a famous view. But that’s where the similarities with his previous abode begin and end. In his pomp, Harvey Weinstein was a familiar, Bacchanalian figure aboard superyachts anchored off Cannes or in the gilded party palaces of St Barts.
But as soon as he is discharged from Bellevue Hospital, where he was last night being treated for heart palpitations and high blood pressure, he will become Prisoner 06581138Z, the newest resident of the notorious Rikers Island correctional facility on New York’s freezing East River.
The gleaming towers of Manhattan dominate the near horizon, but may as well be on another planet. Until recently the largest jail complex in the United States, Rikers Island has acquired a unique reputation for extreme and organised violence, staff corruption and chronic neglect, as well as a number of corresponding nicknames such as Torture Island, Gladiator School or – when the summer temperatures soar – The Oven.
Hundreds are alleged to have died over the years from heat-related medical conditions.
The 400-acre complex, which is in fact home to nine separate jails, houses 6,000 to 7,000 inmates, most of whom come from backgrounds of poverty and deprivation. Not Prisoner 06581138Z, of course. Indeed, prison officials will be well aware that Weinstein’s celebrity makes him a target for attack by those seeking dubious fame, and he is likely to be protected by being held in North Infirmary Unit at the Anna M Kross Center on the island.
Over the years, Rikers Island has hosted a number of famous prisoners. In 1978, punk rocker Sid Vicious, of the Sex Pistols, was held there while on remand for the alleged murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. He died of a heroin overdose in Greenwich Village soon after he was granted bail.
RAPPERS Tupac Shakur, Lil Wayne and Foxy Brown – the island has female prisoner facilities, too – have all been kept on Rikers. Mark Chapman, who murdered exBeatle John Lennon in 1980, was also incarcerated there.
The island, which is situated between Queens and the Bronx, first opened as a prison in 1935. Until the construction of a bridge in 1966, it could only be accessed by ferry. At its modern peak, Rikers held some 14,000 prisoners in quite dreadful conditions. While violence between inmates and towards staff was endemic – there were 1,000 stabbings in 2015, as well as 25 assaults per day – it was also often meted out by officers on the prison population.
In 1990, a small-scale disturbance developed into a pitched battle after hundreds of staff seemed to go on a rampage. Almost 100 prisoners needed hospital treatment, many from areas of the jail where no disturbances had taken place, according to an official investigation. They had simply been attached and beaten by enraged warders. In 2008 it emerged that officers in charge of the 500-inmate Robert N. Davoren Center for juveniles at Rikers had actively encouraged and overseen a brutal ‘fight club’ style regime of self-policing.
In what was known as The Program, inmates were allowed to attack each other. The inmate hierarchy which was consequently founded allowed staff to deputise to the top tier and control a violent population ‘without having to get their hands dirty’, a source told the New York Post. One of the juvenile units was completely controlled by the top dogs – or ‘brawlers’ who decided ‘what food each inmate eats, where they sit, if they can call home or play ball in the gym’. The situation only came to light with the death of 18-year-old Christopher Robins, who was being held in Rikers over a parole violation. After allegedly crossing a warder, one night a group of fellow juvenile inmates entered his unlocked cell and beat him to death.
In 2012, two of the corrections officers received prison sentences for running the ‘fight club’ which led to Robinson’s death. That same year also saw one of Rikers’s most egregious examples of death by deliberate neglect.
Jason Echevarria, 25, was being kept in the Mental Health Assessment Unit for Infracted Inmates, the most violent part of the jail.
In an effort to escape solitary confinement, he swallowed a packet of highly toxic industrial detergent. He told staff he needed help and screamed, vomited and writhed in his cell as the detergent burned his insides. Yet staff did nothing.
The next day he was found dead of an eroded oesophagus. It was ‘one of the longest and most painful deaths I have investigated in any jail’, wrote Homer Venters, a physician and the outspoken chief medical officer for New York City’s Correctional Health Services at the time.
A former captain in the corrections service was subsequently jailed for five years. The dead man’s family was awarded $3.8million in damages.
BUT these were not isolated incidents of staff cruelty. The most powerful of these officers – and hostile to critics – was Norman Seabrook, leader of the union representing New York’s correction officers. Last February he was sentenced to 58 months in prison for embezzling funds.
It was a symbolic moment – proof, if anyone needed it, that something was very rotten on Rikers Island.
Yet if there is one silver lining for Weinstein, it’s that in 2017 Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his intention to close the complex within ten years. Then last October, New York City Council voted for its closure by 2026.
New York will have to find $8billion (€7.35billion) to do so and open four new prisons across the city to replace it. In the meantime, Prisoner 06581138Z will have to get used to his new surroundings.