RIKERS ISLAND AND HOW IT GOT THAT WAY
Prof, an ex-inmate, tells of descent from lib triumph to hellish lockup
It’s the jail that failed.
When Rikers Island opened in 1932, it was hailed as a liberal triumph. It would be a modern, humane alternative to the city’s cruel and crumbling facilities on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island. It was supposed to ensure public safety and promote rehabilitation.
But all it’s done since is make prisoners of everyone — the jailed, the jailers and the taxpayers, who, according to one municipal estimate, shell out half a million dollars a year, per inmate.
That’s the conclusion of “Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage” by Jarrod Shanahan, a professor, activist and one-time Rikers inmate.
Although he’s an assistant professor of criminal justice at Governors State University in Illinois, Shanahan doesn’t have the cool dispassion of an academic. He has a point of view and, at times, a political bias.
“I landed on Rikers as part of a crackdown on anti-police rebellion in New York City in the wake of the August 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Mo.,” he writes. “This was an exhilarating time in which the courage and determination of masses of anonymous people transformed the political terrain of the United States.”
As the Daily News reported when he was arraigned in 2015, Shanahan was one of five protesters charged with assaulting two cops on the Brooklyn Bridge. He was sentenced to 45 days.
Judging by “Captives,” Shanahan still doesn’t like the police. He isn’t any fonder of correction officers, whose perspectives aren’t included here.
But get past the book’s occasional left-leaning talking points, and there’s a scrupulously researched history showing nearly a century of dysfunction of one of the world’s largest correctional institutions. And the inescapable conclusion that, whatever the justice is in shipping people to Rikers, there is little justice once they arrive.
Although Rikers was an improvement at first, within 20 years its facilities had been “taxed to the absolute breaking point,” Shanahan writes.
Designed to house 2,887 inmates, by 1954, it held 3,747. Old beds from the city’s hospitals and homeless shelters were crammed into hallways, auditoriums and even the chapel.
There were some attempts at rehabilitation. A high school on the island, Public School 616, gave inmates the chance to work toward a diploma or learn a trade. Charities and nonprofit groups, from the National Council of Jewish Women to Joe Papp’s Public Theater, brought programs and performances. Twelve-step organizations provided support to addicts and alcoholics.
Still, conditions could be brutal — unless you had money. Then, suddenly, things got easier. Every jail in the city seemed to have some guards who would take a few dollars to look the other way, or even smuggle in contraband. At one facility in Manhattan, the Tombs, in the 1950s a $15 “handling fee” brought you cash from outside; $35 bought a $7 bottle of Scotch.
“It was the smuggling ring’s VIP package — a party for six in a linen room, catered with cold cuts and whisky, for a total of $85 — that finally resulted in the racket’s downfall,” Shanahan notes.
Although eight Tombs guards were arrested in 1955, no one expected the city to really clean house. By then, the crime rate was already on the rise, and wouldn’t slow down for decades; not counting 9/11, it peaked in 1990, when 2,245 people were murdered. Last year, the number was 488. Other criminals, from pot peddlers to muggers, were soon taking up jail space, too.
Someone needed to guard them, and those guards began gaining real political power. Mayor Robert F. Wagner signed
contracts rich in job protections and benefits. Later mayors only added to the perks. Even during the depth of the city’s fiscal crisis in 1975, when the minimum salary for New York City teachers was $9,700, correction officers started at $17,458.
Meanwhile, a project undertaken by Mayor John Lindsay — a bridge connecting Rikers Island to Queens, doing away with the ferry — ended up giving the guards a real weapon. Now that there was only one connection to Rikers, it was easy to block it with protesters and bring traffic — and the entire justice system — to a standstill. Which correction officers would do, whenever they felt disrespected.
Corruption and crime, fear and fury — it was a dangerous combination. And the effects were soon apparent, outside and inside the jail.
“Facilities were so crowded and miserable, and the courts so backlogged, that the number of pretrial prisoners who opted not to go to trial increased,” Shanahan notes.
Between 1975 and 1980, “guilty pleas to felonies increased from 47% to 66%,” he writes. “The percentage of defendants sent to state prison ... rose from 23 to 54%.”
Innocence didn’t matter if you couldn’t make bail. Better to plead guilty and do a stretch in state prison then waste months, even years, in Rikers just waiting for a court date.
Of course, faced with sitting endlessly in Rikers or taking a deal, some defendants chose a third route, and escaped. Or, as Shanahan puts it, “rejected the authority of the Department of Corrections and undertook ingenious attempts to proactively free themselves from its custody.”
Three teenagers on the island managed to steal an officer’s car and simply drive off the island. A group of 24 prisoners hijacked a bus. Another pair hid in a bread truck. Four prisoners blew up trash bags like balloons, and used them as rafts. One man switched clothes with his visiting “attorney” — actually a friend from outside — and walked out the front gate.
They had good reasons to flee. Inside Rikers, cafeteria trays were turned into clubs and bedsprings sharpened into shivs. Rape was a constant threat. Health care was scarce, with some seriously ill inmates left to die alone in their cells. Guards would beat prisoners for the slightest infraction.
Most of the violence was ignored, by everyone.
Some of it was even institutionalized. “In early 2009, three guards were indicted for their role in an organized ring called ‘the Program,’ an extortion racket in which handpicked adolescent prisoners had been deputized to administer the jail,” Shanahan notes.
Officers at Rikers encouraged the violence, then covered up the assaults. The union blamed it all on a few “bad apples.”
Perhaps the saddest story was that of 16-year-old Kalief Browder. Charged with stealing a backpack, unable to raise bail, the Bronx teenager was sent to Rikers to await trial. He spent nearly three years there, two in solitary confinement. He was assaulted by prisoners, and, reportedly, a guard. He repeatedly attempted suicide. But, stubbornly maintaining his innocence, he refused to take a deal.
Eventually, the government decided not to try the case. Browder was released. He went home, but the damage was already done. In 2015, he hanged himself.
Clearly, critics claimed, Rikers was beyond reform. In 2019, the City Council voted to close it down by 2026. On Tuesday, there will be a hearing to determine if an outside official needs to run it in the meantime.
It is still open, though.
What might replace it on the island is an open question. And, what could replace it as a jail is endlessly debated. Reformers insist that, whatever it is, it will be an improvement.
Of course, that’s what they once said about Rikers.