The truly corrosive problem at Rikers
It’s the culture of violence
The first punch to the kidneys takes your breath away, but the second one can steal your soul. Someone in Rikers Island picked a fight with me for my commissary money, and the corrections officer didn’t feel like writing us up for it. So he lined us up side by side with our hands against the wall before landing full-on kidney punches on both sides.
I was 16 years old and weighed 135 pounds.
Today, I’m an advocate for formerly incarcerated people trying to learn how to live in the real world. In that capacity, I visit Rikers often.
One whiff of the pungent cleaner they use to mop the floor is all I need to remember the years I spent there. It smells like a hospital, but it feels like a madhouse. I see the drab, gray, floor-to-ceiling cement and hear the sounds of echoing voices, keys jingling and gates clanging shut.
I remember the mice at Rikers. They don’t scurry when you stomp your feet. At night, I had to make sure my sheets weren’t hanging off the bed, so they wouldn’t crawl up them while I slept. They acted like they owned the place.
Only the mice live without fear there. My most prominent memories from Rikers, the ones that haunt me today, are of the unrelenting terror I faced on a daily basis. Surviving Rikers means living in a state of hyper-awareness, constantly on the defensive, always ready for the next fight.
People who do not join a gang will soon find themselves constantly fighting as a result of not having the protection of gangs.
The threat of violence from corrections officers is no better. Some officers were members of the very gangs they were supposed to be supervising. The retribution for rubbing a corrections officer the wrong way was unforgiving. Sometimes they would decide to settle a score by putting down their badge and baton to duke it out as if it were personal.
And it was personal. Beat up a corrections officer and five more would take his place. More than once, I watched officers lock all but one man up in our cells. We listened to that man wail as they beat him relentlessly.
On Rikers, violence is the law of the land — eat or be eaten. I spent months in solitary for fighting over a gang-regulated phone. It’s hard on a teenager to spend 23 hours a day for months in a cage with no human interaction, no conversation whatsoever. It can rob you of your sanity, and for many it does.
Fortunately teenagers are no longer being put in punitive segregation. But in so many ways, for thousands of people accused of crimes, the place remains hell.
I commend Mayor de Blasio’s commitment to close Rikers in 10 years, based on the recommendations of an independent panel. But people living and working there cannot wait a decade for the city to mitigate the violent nightmare within its walls.
It is also naive to think the problems will go away once the city transfers pre-trial detainees to local jails. Even if the new jails are beautifully designed, modern facilities where lawyers and family can visit just by hopping on the subway, the core of the problem is the culture of violence.
Obviously, prisoners themselves feed that culture. But the corrections officers contribute to the problem in ways we must acknowledge and confront.
In 2015, the city, in settling a class-action lawsuit brought by a inmates who had been brutalized, agreed to a series of reforms. Last week, the court-appointed monitor overseeing those changes released a report saying violence by correction officers is on the rise.
Between last Aug. 1 and the end of 2016, there were 305 documented altercations that involved a strike to the head — many “utilized to punish, discipline or retaliate against an inmate.”
One inmate sustained 10 head injuries during a fight with seven correction officers. Investigators said, despite what the officers said, there was no evidence the inmate had struck them.
Yet the officers’ union has fought all serious measures to hold officers accountable for the violent culture they perpetuate. And our policymakers have not shown the will to push back against that powerful lobby.
There are almost no mirrors in jails. People in prison can go decades without seeing their reflection. But New York City policymakers can look themselves in the mirror. And it’s about time they get honest about the fact that closing Rikers is just the start, not the end, of addressing the culture of violence that pervades our city’s corrections system.