![]() I got out at 19, but landed back on the island after I shot and killed a man on a Brooklyn street at 24. As a white boy, I was the minority in C-74 the sick paradox was that I felt safe only when I acted violently. After violating my probation, I wound up serving a year in a jail for teens: C-74, which we called “adolescents at war.” On my first day, a group of Ñetas (a Puerto Rican gang) beat me up after I refused to give them my sneakers. I was first sent to Rikers in 1995, at the age of 18, after I got caught with a gun. But it’s the general atmosphere of Rikers, with its mythic reputation of being the most dangerous place to be detained in America, that most affects the psyche. ![]() And the facilities include mostly makeshift trailers, built for temporary housing, with corridors that stretch out into long, eerie hallways. A narrow bridge (which Mayor John Lindsay christened the “bridge of hope,” and the rapper Flavor Flav more accurately called the “bridge of pain”) is the only way on or off the island, which makes traveling to it so difficult that lawyers, even ones you’re paying, won’t visit you much. For one, it’s an entire island devoted to housing the city’s undesirables. There are specific elements, unique to Rikers, that make it so unbearable. What becomes clear is that the people aren’t what makes it bad-the environment is. Through themed topical chapters-“Bullpen Therapy,” “Race,” “Gangs,” “Mental Health”-the authors create a vivid picture of what life on the island is like. In their new book, Rikers: An Oral History, Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau reveal that the jail robs something from the people who live and work there. Rikers is a whole island filled with people at the worst point in their life. What makes jail so hard is not knowing what is to become of you. Jail is a tension-filled place, with months-long stretches between court dates, hours of nothingness, clashes over who’s next on the phone or who didn’t get extras on chicken day. You go to a jail, like the ones housed in the sprawling mega-complex on Rikers, after you’re arrested and denied bail or can’t afford it. ![]() You go to prison after you get sentenced. That period, and the year I did on the island as a teenager, was, by far, the most brutal. But before my sentencing, I spent a few years on New York City’s Rikers Island. Sign up for it here.įor the past 21 years, I’ve been locked up, mostly in maximum-security prisons: Clinton, Attica, Sing Sing, and now Sullivan, in the Catskills. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. ![]()
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