Ten thousand inmates on any given day.
Ten thousand people in a place they certainly do not want to be.
Inmate on inmate violence is common.
Assaults on officers are frequent.
Officers, we should say, with a terrible history of brutality.
“Close it down!”
people have screamed for years about this prison, “It’s an offense to humanity!”
But it somehow manages to stay open, and now violence is at an all-time high.
Welcome to Rikers Island.
It’s true that for a few years now activists and lawyers have been calling for the place
to be closed.
Rikers Island has a reputation as being one of the worst places to be locked up in the
USA.
It has been called a “broken system”, a penitentiary befitting one of Dante’s
circles of hell.
It’s also the second-largest jail system in the US, after the Los Angeles County jail
system.
Let’s now look at some practical facts, and then we’ll come back to the mayhem.
Around 85% of the inmates that are locked up from day to day haven’t been sentenced.
The rest of the folks are serving short sentences.
This doesn’t, however, mean it’s any less dangerous than a prison where people are serving
long sentences for extremely violent crimes.
Ask people who’ve been through the jail system in the US, and many will tell you that
prison was better than what came before it.
Sure, in prisons, you have dangerous alliances in gangs.
You have riots and murder, and you have organized crime, but the sheer disarray of jail and
the mental bedlam of prisoners not knowing what’s going to happen to them can create
a very negative environment.
As one former inmate of the California jail system put it, “People are going to court
and fighting their cases, they are angry, not knowing their futures.
People are very on edge due to everything that’s happening so fast, and they are prone
to being more violent for lesser offenses of perceived disrespect.”
Rikers island stands as testimony to that.
It routinely makes the top ten of the very worst places to be locked up in America, jail
or prison.
So, in 2015, New York City agreed to a settlement in which it promised to make things right.
Thousands of surveillance cameras were installed.
The city said it would clamp down on guard-inmate abuse.
But did things get better?
The answer is a resounding NO.
You have to ask, why is Rikers island so resistant to change?
Why is it perennially the human equivalent of a wasp’s nest whose inhabitants have
just been upset by a clumsy gardener?
As the office of the United States attorney said in 2015, Rikers Island has been home
to a “decades-long culture of violence.”
Surely something could have been done to fix things.
The island itself was once owned by Mr. Abraham Rycken, a Dutch settler who stated a claim
to it in 1664.
The Ryckens became the Ricker family, and those dudes sold the island to the city of
New York in 1884.
It wasn’t until 1925 that the island became home to a jail.
Around that time, the place was home to tons of garbage put there by the city.
That attracted rats, so many that no amount of “poison gas, poison bait, ferocious dogs
and pigs” could get rid of them.
So, there you go.
A rat-infested hellhole was what greeted those first prisoners.
The place soon got a reputation, a distinction of depressing deplorability it would never
really shake off.
Today we’re not going to focus too much on those bygone days, but what has happened
there in the last decade or so.
It’s only quite recently that people have been calling Rikers Island such things as
“a symbol of brutality and inhumanity.”
Those are some stern words, but former inmates wouldn’t disagree.
Many of them that have had cause to complain were just teenage inmates, too.
Take for instance a guy named Vidal Guzman.
He went there when he was just 16 years old.
As he sat on the bus going across the bridge to the island, a guard looked at him and said,
“Welcome to gladiator school.”
For those not too familiar with prison talk, the term gladiator school is often used to
describe young offenders’ institutions in the US and in the UK.
Guzman offered these haunting words when he talked to the BBC about his time there.
He said, “Rikers doesn't leave you.”
In the same article, a guy named Johnny Perez was interviewed.
He also went to Rikers at the age of 16, but as a repeat offender, in the years that followed,
he spent time in nine different prisons in the state of New York.
He said Rikers was the worst place of all.
He explained why, saying things that sound almost unbelievable.
“In Rikers, the officers give you a knife,” he said.
“They'll sell you a razor.
I've bought drugs from correction officers who've turned around and told me they're going
to put me in solitary if my mother doesn't meet them in a parking lot to pay them.”
He also said he spent time in solitary confinement, which has been shown to have a much more profound
effect on a young person’s psyche.
One of the reasons is that a young person’s brain is still developing.
The frontal lobe isn’t done developing until around the age of 25, and that’s the so-called
“executive suite”, responsible for controlling impulses and thinking about the consequences
of actions.
“The experience of isolation is especially frightening, traumatizing, and stressful for
juveniles,” a psychologist said about solitary for teens.
“These traumatic experiences can interfere with and damage these essential developmental
processes, and the damage may be irreparable.”
In short, a lot of young men were getting thrown into that wasp’s nest, and they weren’t
exactly receiving much care and attention from the authorities.
In fact, many of them were getting the exact opposite.
At the same time, many of the youngsters in such a place lacked parental guidance, if
they had any guidance at all.
For many, trauma was piled on trauma.
And then they were locked in solitary.
That’s tantamount to playing catch with a hand grenade or opening a new Walmart right
next to a minefield.
The authorities must have known that by treating young kids with cruel and unusual punishment,
one day, someone would call the prison brutal and inhumane.
In 2018, New York mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted, “No one under 18 will go to Rikers Island,”
but it still didn’t stop the violence.
Another former inmate explained just what the atmosphere is like in there.
He said once you are in, you have to learn quickly how to survive.
He said, “It's a place where you have to choose: predator or prey.”
The common refrain, one we imagine some of you are now thinking, is “do the crime,
do the time.”
That’s all well and good, but you have to ask if it’s better for society on the whole
for prisoners to come out worse, not better.
It’s too easy to say, if I was in jail or prison, I wouldn’t get caught up in any
of that nonsense.
But what if someone put you to the test?
What if you had to choose between predator and prey?
Institutions should be there to ensure no one has to make that grim choice, but as you’ll
now see, it seems the officers at Rikers Island have historically not been noted for their
compassion and progressive thinking.
Take for instance the man named Lloyd Nicholson.
He was an officer back in the 2000s who got a name for himself for introducing something
called “The Program” to Rikers Island.
It was later described as a kind of “fight club” for prisoners.
Nicholson and other officers actively encouraged young prisoners to fight each other.
The New York Times wrote about this in 2009, saying, “The pattern of cases suggests that
city correction officials have been aware of a problem in which Rikers guards have acquiesced
or encouraged violence among inmates.”
This led to lawsuits filed against the city, and not one of them ever went to trial.
According to the Times, fight club resulted in some inmates being severely beaten, with
at least one young man being killed.
It’s reminiscent of a 2005 case in the UK, where guards purposefully put a racist, extremely
violent inmate, in the same cell as a meek, 19-year old non-violent offender of Asian
ethnicity.
The guards then made bets in a game they called “Gladiator”, in which they had to guess
what would happen.
The outcome was the young man being beaten to death in the cell, one day before he was
due to be released.
In Rikers, the guards picked out tough inmates who they then gave positions of authority.
According to reports on the matter, they could be “managers, foot soldiers, and enforcers”.
The guards also trained those inmates how to best assault someone or at least restrain
them.
They would sometimes tell those inmates where and when an attack would take place.
So, it is surprising that Rikers became what it was when guidance from adults was so perverse?
On top of the violence, some officers were involved in an extortion ring with the prisoners.
After that, the city said it would take steps to ensure nothing like it ever happens again.
But when officers have not been hiring inmates to extort and beat on other inmates, they
have been known to act violently themselves.
This is what a US Attorney commented, “It is a place where brute force is the first
impulse rather than the last resort, a place where verbal insults are repaid with physical
injuries, where beatings are routine, while accountability is rare.”
A report stated that inmates were regularly seeing guards beat up young inmates, but in
fear of what would happen to them, they hardly ever spoke up about it.
Officers hardly ever lost their jobs or faced criminal action.
The New York Times wrote about one officer who had been written up 76 times for excessive
use of force, although he faced disciplinary action only once.
A report stated, “The most egregious inmate beatings frequently occur in locations without
video surveillance.”
Just to give you an idea of what can happen, here’s what one investigation discovered.
In 2012, two officers beat on one young inmate.
This was the outcome: “The officers punched the inmate multiple
times and kicked him in the head, resulting in serious injuries including a two-centimeter
laceration to his chin that required sutures, a lost tooth, and cracking and chipping to
the inmate’s other teeth.”
We are sure you know that in a corrections officer’s handbook, nowhere does it state,
“Once an inmate is restrained, proceed to kick his teeth out.”
How are inmates supposed to react when this happens.
Violence begets violence, and that’s why Rikers is violent.
It was stated that within the prison, both officers and inmates use a term called, “Hold
it down.”
It means take the beating you are given and keep your mouth shut.
This is from that same report: “An inmate reported that he was punched
and stomped on by several officers in a school corridor after verbally insulting one of them
during an argument.
He asked to go to the medical clinic, but the officers refused to take him there, giving
him tissues to clean himself up and telling him to ‘hold it down.’”
The list of beatings handed out by officers is a long one.
We read about how inmates that had already been handcuffed and were laying on the ground
were pounded by batons and kicks to the head.
Beatings of handcuffed inmates were common.
We’re not saying these things happen in a vacuum.
Being a prison officer among young offenders with violent tendencies has to be one of the
most stressful jobs in the world.
But when a news article states that after a beating – in handcuffs – “Two of the
inmates reported that they had lost consciousness or blacked out during the incident,” you
have to ask if something hasn’t gone wrong in the orb of what we call rehabilitation.
Then you have the more well-known cases on top of the daily chaos in this jail.
You all know what happened to the 16-year old named Kalief Browder.
He went into Rikers and spent much of his three years in solitary confinement without
his case going to trial.
It’s believed that what happened to him at Rikers paved the way for the tragic story
that was the rest of his life.
Then there was the case of Jose Bautista, reported in 2014.
He was only in for a misdemeanor after a family argument got out of control, but after not
being able to pay the $250 bail, he found himself on that hellish island.
This is how quickly a poor person’s life can spin out of control.
One day officers went to his cell after hearing he’d been threatening to hurt himself.
Four officers arrived, handcuffed him, and then started pummeling him.
He had to have emergency surgery for a perforated bowel.
The story of Robert Hinton also made the press.
He was handcuffed and hogtied, and dragged down a landing in 2012 by five guards.
They took him to a solitary confinement cell and beat him senseless.
He ended up with a broken nose and a fractured vertebra.
Hinton was said to be suffering from mental ill-health.
The media later reported that of the 11,000 inmates at Rikers back then, 4,000 of them
were mentally unwell.
Over 11 months in 2013, 129 inmates suffered “serious injuries” after being beaten
by officers.
77 percent of them were diagnosed with a mental illness.
80 percent of them said they were beaten while in handcuffs.
Sometimes inmates have been treated horrendously when they were physically unwell.
Take the case of Ronald Spear.
The 52-year old was sick and walked with a cane.
In 2012, he asked to see a doctor.
When a doctor informed him that he’d have to wait to be examined, Spear got into an
argument with an officer.
That officer and another officer pinned Spear down, and then punched and kicked him.
One officer shouted at him, “Remember that I'm the one who did this to you.”
Spear died soon after, and officers tried to cover up what had happened.
The officers, in this case, were eventually convicted of various crimes.
Still, Spear’s sister said the convictions wouldn’t likely change “the way that officers
behave, the way the city allows them to behave.”
You have to ask how some officers have been getting away with beatings.
An article in the New York Times gave us some insight into that.
It stated this in 2021, “From January 2019 to August 2020, 56 percent of the more than
270 correction officers who were disciplined — including a dozen supervisors — lied,
misled investigators or filed incomplete or inaccurate reports.”
17 officers also gave false statements when they were interviewed.
It would be unfair to tar all the officers with the same brush.
One Rikers Island guard who spoke not long ago said every day before he goes to work,
he prays to God to protect him.
“I worry about my safety all the time,” he said.
Inmate assaults against officers at Rikers went up from 9.2 assaults for every 1,000
prisoners in 2018 to 12.6 assaults for every 1,000 prisoners in 2019.
Inmate on inmate assaults also went up, from 55.8 assaults for every 1,000 prisoners in
2018 to 69.5 in 2019.
Whatever actions the prison and the city has taken don’t seem to have worked.
Just a few days before we wrote this show, some people were protesting the possible closing
down of the jail.
The reason being, there was no money for other jails, with some people saying they didn’t
want jails in their communities.
“The chaos is on Rikers Island now.
The inmates control Rikers Island, not the correctional officers,” said a former member
of the Guardian Angels.
A news report that very same day talked about how one officer was “ambushed” and beaten
by an inmate.
The inmate stole his keys and proceeded to walk to another prisoner’s cell, where he
slashed the occupant with a homemade weapon.
In this case, it seems the prison was understaffed that day.
This is a complaint you’ll hear from officers all over the USA.
One unnamed source said, “If there were two officers, this could have been prevented.”
It’s a complicated situation because the use of solitary confinement has been harshly
criticized, but officers say when they are not allowed to take a violent inmate out of
the general population, they and other inmates are put at risk.
One officer said this is why so many prison officers have been leaving the job.
Still, you have to ask where this culture of violence came from.
As the saying goes, you can’t heal a gaping wound with a plaster.
The cause of the problem has to be treated at its roots.
Is more solitary confinement really the solution?
Understaffing has been blamed for conditions worsening in recent months.
After one man was found dead in his cell in August, it was revealed that Rikers was getting
even worse than before.
Some inmates were not even getting regular meals or exercise.
As well as men being found dead in their cells, this lack of staff and its consequences has
led to what was recently called “severe” problems.
In fact, in July the New York Times reported that officers were suing the city for an “inhumane
working environment.”
The lawsuit claimed there was a “pervasive level of disorder and chaos” in the prison,
and violence was surging.
One female officer said she went to work expecting to do a 16-hour shift but said she had recently
done a 24-hour shift.
She even found it hard to get permission to go to a lactation room.
When she was asked about her experience at Rikers, she said, “It’s hell.”
Another female officer described her job in a nutshell, saying it was “mental and physical
exhaustion and anguish.”
She also said, “it’s hell”.
That word is used a lot where Rikers Island is concerned.
Now you need to watch, “Why You Wouldn't Survive Supermax Prison.”
Or, take the deep dive with, “50 Insane Facts About Prison You Wouldn't Believe.”