SOLITARY HELL SPEAK

To spend 23 hours a day in tiny cell with ‘just a toilet & a bed’

I had to stay focused. I said, one day I’m going to be free. I’m not going to let these people overpower me.

RON KUBY, defense attorney: I had one client sent to solitary for thirty days for possession of Tylenol, just over-the-counter Tylenol, and some makeup. This was at the Rose M. Singer Center, which has women. Probably the more horrific stories are the use of solitary confinement to warehouse the severely mentally ill. I recall one case, I’m not gonna reveal her name, but she was known at Rose M. Singer Center as Shitty. And she was known for that because she was constantly using her own feces to hurl and to write on prison walls and to adorn herself.

And she was placed in solitary for months and months in this stinking, fetid, feces-covered cell. And on the outside world, it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. In a place like Rikers, the squeaky wheel gets shut down and shut up in a cell so deep that nobody can hear the wheels squeak anymore.

HELEN TAYLOR, detained 1970s, 1980s: There was just a toilet and a bed, and you was just thrown in there, and you took a shower every other day for fifteen minutes. Your food would be ice cold, and the room was filthy. They let you clean it once a week for fifteen minutes. Everything was fifteen minutes. You had to lie there and be quiet, and if you weren’t, they would come in and beat the crap out of you. There was no TV. You get an hour of rec a day.

It was like they were trying to destroy people. You had to be strong.

JACQUELINE McMICKENS, correction commissioner, 1984 to 1986: I have no problems with it at all. I think some people need to be off by themselves. That boy who decides he’s going to throw chairs? Put him in a room and watch him. You don’t go into Macy’s and Gimbels and take whatever you want. There’s a consequence.

DR. HOMER VENTERS, correctional health services chief medical officer, 2015 to 2017: We did this analysis of about 250,000 jail admissions and came up with very compelling data that people exposed to solitary had about a seven times higher likelihood of self-harm and about a six times higher likelihood of a high-lethality self-harm.

DONOVAN DRAYTON, detained 2007 to 2012: It’s like being locked away, locked up and the key thrown away. It’s like you in a little-ass cell for twenty-three hours a day, if you make rec for that one hour and