The cursed island before Rikers

With plans to close Rikers Island underway, note that this isn’t the first time New York City’s leaders judged its correctional facilities so hopelessly irredeemable that the only thing to do was start over — or believed that moving cells from one place to another would solve social injustices outside the jail gates.

Over a hundred years ago, when prisons were located on Roosevelt Island, then called Blackwell’s Island, the grim story was much the same. After purchasing the island in 1828, the city built a penitentiary for men and women who’d been convicted of serious crimes. Later came a workhouse for those who committed what today we call quality-of-life offenses, such as disorderly conduct, intoxication or vagrancy.

Then came a lunatic asylum, an almshouse, hospitals. Exiling the poor, the mad and the criminal to the same isolated piece of land reinforced a destructive association that persists to this day — that the mentally ill are dangerous and the poor are criminals in disguise.

New York’s criminal justice system evolved to support these beliefs, and the groups sentenced confirmed this bias. “Disorderly conduct,” for instance, came to mean whatever the police and the courts wanted it to mean, to imprison whichever group they wanted to target. In the 19th century, that was the Irish and women who didn’t know their place. In time, some city courts acquired the nickname “the Poor Men’s Courts,’ because the cases of the wealthy were often dismissed by judges who’d been bought off, or merely paid their fine or bail and went home.

That left the poor, who were taken to a large reception area upon arrival at Blackwell’s, where they were shaved, stripped naked and publicly scrubbed before being doubled up in cells that, at barely seven feet high, three and a half feet wide, and seven feet deep, couldn’t be said to humanely fit one person. Every morning, the inmates were led to the East River to dump their chamberpots.

Quarantining inmates allowed guards to treat their charges however they wanted. These were criminals, after all, and they had it coming.

Although originally intended as institutions of reform, the penitentiary and workhouse became infamous as training grounds for criminals. Inmates weren’t redeemed; they were damned. Teenage girls who’d been sent to Blackwell’s for disorderly conduct were sometimes met upon discharge by a seemingly kind woman. She’d then take them back to a dive, drug them, and thrust them into service as prostitutes. Now “fallen women,” they spent the rest of their lives in and out of prison.

Finally conceding the problem, the city paid $180,000 for Rikers Island in 1884. Commissioners who oversaw Blackwell’s visited prisons all over the country, studying their designs, and confident the modern facilities were going to “return the prisoner to society better than when he entered it, not worse, as is the case today.” It took 52 years to build Rikers Island facilities and move the last inmates from one island to another.

Rikers is now recognized as one of the worst jail complexes in the U.S. The city simply recreated all the problems it had before, only this time with plumbing, and on an island that was harder to get to than Blackwell’s.

Rikers is beyond redemption and must be shut down, but no matter how state-of-the-art new facilities will be, they won’t fix the underlying inequities.

As almost every group who has studied Rikers has advised, we must stop isolating inmates with limited oversight, where prisoners are cut off from friends, family and other support. The system of bail, blatantly discriminatory against the poor, also has to end.

But to simply relocate the prosecution of poverty isn’t enough. We must reject the bias of criminal justice that lands as squarely on the poor now as it did a century ago. Where are the standing armies of police to investigate the crimes of the elite the way we monitor the crimes of those in poverty? Why a war on drugs and not a war on financial crime? If Rikers Island had been filled with an equal number of bankers and corporate executives, it would never have become the crisis of human misery it is today.

When city officials laid the cornerstone for the Rikers penitentiary, they knew history was not going to look back kindly on what had transpired on Blackwell's Island, and tried to pre-empt future criticism in a statement that read: “We did the best we knew how in the light of such knowledge and understanding as was given us.” Well, we now have two centuries worth of mistakes to inform us. Let’s not repeat them.