What life is really like on Rikers Island

It’s a short trip across a bridge to reach a 413-acre parcel of landfill—Rikers Island, New York City’s most notorious deadlock—situated as a 19th-century penal colony in the middle of the East River. Ranked as one of the 10 worst correctional facilities in the US, inmates there wait to be sent to a federal prison for long periods, or are short-timers doing what’s called “City Time.”

A former Rikers resident, disgraced Seventies movie producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, who had been awaiting trial on sex-crime charges, claimed the Big Apple pen was rotten to the core. He sued the city in November for $5 million, alleging “deplorable conditions” where he feared for his life.

Now David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan — both of whom spent time at Rikers — have collaborated to write “City Time, On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island,” (New York University Press), an exposé of life at Rikers for nearly a century. the island that once served as a military training ground during the Civil War, and today has a view of LaGuardia Track and the Mets’ home field, Citi Field.

Arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2016, Shanahan served a short Rikers sentence and wrote a landmark study of the prison after his release, while Campbell, convicted in 2018 of “fighting” at an anti-fascist protest, served a year in the city. in awe Their book reveals first-hand accounts of the brutality and banality of daily life at Rikers.

“The violence and utter senselessness of short-term incarceration is reflected in every aspect of the city’s time. The overwhelming boredom that pervades daily life is symptomatic of a social order that simply has no use for the people locked there—in a dangerous, disgusting place that will leave them worse off than when they entered,” the authors write.

Both college-educated and straight, they fortunately avoided the violence that accompanies Rikers’ trans and gay sexual subculture. But making prisoners assigned a prison number and prison garb was bad enough – making them feel “loss and death”.

On the first day, the authors recall, Rikers’ reception area consisted of filthy holding pens where new inmates crowded near rotting, unwashed toilets, along with sickly polluted air—”the smell of sweat, feet, piss, shit, burps, farts and bleach.” Stripping to their underwear, Shanahan and Campbell, like all other Rikers inmates, had to hover over a chair that could reveal the metal contraband stored inside—that’s even before the actual search began. strip physics.

Inmates must then change into ill-fitting forest-green suits and Velcro flat-bottomed shoes before being escorted to the receiving dormitory, equipped with immobile single beds with deflated, flimsy mattresses. There are 28 rectangular dormitories in total containing a total of 1,850 beds — “massive open rooms,” the authors write. Each dormitory is the size of a basketball court – with crawling cockroaches as well as corrections officers patrolling the perimeter.

A 6-foot-wide corridor called “Broadway” bisects the dormitory with six rows of rusted iron frames ten feet apart and attached to the floor on either side of the main road. Limited hygiene standards prohibit naked showering and inmates are required to cover up when using the toilet. Unpleasant smells and grotesque sights only add to the loss of privacy.

Racial and ethnic tensions boil out of control, but gang members help corrections officers keep temperatures down. With so many inmates serving time for theft, the dormitory population felt to the perpetrators like a convention of boosters.

They describe how an inmate was caught removing nail polish from CVS in large quantities and then selling it to a nail salon in Chinatown. Another recounted filling his bag with Haagen-Daz at a Midtown Manhattan market and selling it to bodegas in Harlem for two dollars a carton. Duane Reade’s surveillance footage caught him stealing more than $1,000 and he was charged with grand larceny. For him, however, Rikers was like a stay at the Ritz—he normally lived in a dangerous, crime-ridden New York homeless shelter.

“Unsanitary conditions are the law of the land on Rikers,” the authors write. The meals were barely edible. Mold, roaches and even rotting mice often end up on the dinner tray. The bread, bone dry and tasteless, was placed on the table wrapped in white paper chewed by mice, and the mice lived in the kitchen along with a squirrel that inhabited one of the bread machines. Chicken, whether undercooked or overcooked, produced diarrhea and the water in the kitchen sometimes turned brown or black.

Sex—or the lack of it—is on everyone’s mind at Rikers, the authors write, and rumors often spread about sex with female corrections officers. The already strict rule of wearing underwear while bathing recalled cases of covert sexual activity in the shower.

Drugs are also rampant.

K2, which mimics THC, is easily smuggled into Rikers — as is heroin, which can be sprayed on a sheet of paper posted in an envelope — being colorless, odorless, tasteless. Tobacco is second in popularity with a pack of cigarettes selling for up to $1,000. Tobacco rolled into a page from the Bible and the width of a match sells for $10 to $20, the authors find.

Along with professional shoplifters, other perpetrator inmates ranged from bank robbers, drunk drivers, wife beaters, drug dealers, felonies and various types of petty criminals. Half of the 6,000 inmates typically served 30 days or less of city time, mostly for theft and drug possession.

“These tragic men were caught in an endless cycle of poverty, substance abuse, mental illness and bad decisions whose only agenda seemed to be escaping reality by getting high and supporting this habit by any means necessary “, the authors write. And they only got out of bed for their daily dose of methadone.

And there were the violent gang members – Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings and Folk Nation. “There is little to do at Rikers compared to state prisons, and finding creative ways to stave off the ever-increasing boredom and cabin fever quickly becomes a priority,” the authors write.

How to make time tolerable and go fast is the name of the card game, playing match and rummy. The dice, banned at Rikers, are made from soap and toilet paper.

Authors quickly learned that the most popular books that came through the mail featured graphic drug dealing, violence and sex. Pocket Bibles gave scrolls about weeds instead of the word of God. The post proved to be known to outside news, read by guards and then rescued from the trash by inmates.

As with inmates, there are strict rules for Rikers visitors, the authors write. Rikers visitors are subjected to invasive searches by aggressive corrections officers for contraband, and inmates are ordered to rest and stop touching.

Despite the city’s endless efforts at reform, existence in these overcrowded city-time dormitories is hellish and toxic. All the while, there is the threat of violence, the lack of privacy, the incessant bodily functions in the open air, and the inherent unpleasant smells and constant grotesque sights. As the authors note, life at Rikers is “a ceaseless dull irritation always threatening to explode.”