Right now in New York City, there are people who are complaining that there’s no heat in some of the housing units at Rikers Island. There are people who are being locked in cells for hours and hours of the day, in violation of Local Law 42, not being fed, the cells that they inhabit are tiny. The beds are not real beds — it’s a piece of metal with a little pad on top of it.
Why don’t we build people up instead of throwing them in jail and breaking them down?
People don’t have regular access to their family members; sometimes visiting hours are constrained because a building will go on lockdown, where people are kept in their cells for twenty-three hours a day and not able to get out. People are not taken to their medical appointments. There are people with significant mental health complications in Rikers that aren’t getting the medications or the mental health care that they need. A lot of young people who are at Rikers Island are not receiving the schooling that they need because of fear of leaving their cell and being attacked. These are the lives people are leading inside of these institutions, and they scream at the top of their lungs but nobody hears them.
Mind you, there are people who are in Rikers Island because bail was set on them, not having been found guilty of anything — legally innocent but still sitting in these types of conditions. Oftentimes this adds to the cycle of violence, because the things people experience when they’re in jail, the kind of torturous things that I was talking about, where you can’t get food or are locked in your cell, and you take that with you when you leave. People suffer so much trauma and torture that is then brought back to the community, back to the home.
If you look at Kalief Browder‘s story, he was sitting at Rikers Island because he allegedly stole a backpack. He was repeatedly found not guilty, taken to court, and taken back to Rikers Island, but then was put into solitary…
Auteur: Conrad Blackburn
