Rikers Island

Things to Consider

 - Rikers is a jail and not a prison. This means that people who are at Rikers are supposed to be there for a year or less - otherwise, they would be transferred to a facility upstate - that's where actual "time" is supposed to be served.

- Sometimes that doesn't happen, with horrifying consequences.

- Nearly 80% of the people at Rikers are there because they are awaiting trial - so the term "inmate" is really a misnomer (because if they're awaiting trial they haven't been convicted of anything). So it's more accurate to call people at Rikers "detainees". And the reason they're sitting on Rikers is that they're too poor to bail themselves out.

- Really though "inmate" is a terrible word and people should stop using it. (For the record, I take the time to say "people who are incarcerated / people who have been incarcerated / people in conflict with the law.")

- Nearly 90% of people at Rikers are Black or Latinx.

- The instances of mental illness, sexual assault, and violence (often caused by corrections officers) are rampant.

- There's a bakery as well as a nursery on the island.

- Up until very recently, pregnant women at Rikers were shackled. I went to Albany to advocate for reproductive rights where this bill was on the docket and I remember asking one of the congressmen if he knew this happened at Rikers. He was shocked. They always are, even if it's their own district.

Visiting Rikers Island for the First Time

I was hired through some social workers at Columbia University to pilot a project teaching English and Social Studies to young people at Rikers in June 2015. I'd never seen a correctional facility before. I'd researched Rikers the best I could beforehand but reality will always pale your research.

I stepped onto the island for the first time at nineteen years old, wearing a bright green I don't belong here "TUTOR" shirt. The officers who let me in had laughed at me before telling me where I was supposed to go. I got to my building, sat next to a "DISCHARGE FIREARMS HERE" box and waited for someone to call me.

I was sick with worry - not about going to the facility, but because I was so sure the students wouldn't like me or trust me. I wouldn't like me, I'd thought as I slid my bag through the metal detector and pulled off my shoes (Rikers will always make me take off my shoes). I wouldn't trust me, either. Why would they? I was a novice in the criminal justice world, barely older than they were, and our experiences in life differed dramatically.

Two different officers brought me through a maze of doors - most of which were controlled by Someone Else who must have been watching us. I passed by a cell that I thought was holding people and struggled to walk normally (when I turned my head the slightest bit, all that was in the cell was a pile of equipment - I'd hoped not to see people in cages on my very first day. After that day, I saw occupied spaces with quite a bit of frequency).

A man passed me with an officer on either side of him - decked out in orange, hands behind his back. Remember what happened to Clarice the first time she visited a facility? my mind hissed at me. I couldn't help it. I braced myself.

The officer escorting me looked up and smiled - all four of them talked with each other for a minute. The conversation was light and they mentioned how the man would be leaving Rikers soon; they laughed with each other. Officer and incarcerated man. My brow furrowed. This wasn't the Rikers I'd heard about. This was four people talking with each other.

My officer pulled a key away from her uniform - something iron and ancient. They moved me through yet another passage and I signed a book with my intentions before being led to the door of the classroom. The door clicked open. I stepped inside.

Seven teenaged boys dressed in white shirts and black sweatpants looked me up and down. And smiled.

The teacher waved me in and continued with his lesson. A corrections officer was sitting in another corner - comfortably enough that it screamed of a regular occurrence. I sat at a desk and waited for someone to interact with me (or for the clock to run out; after the initial once-over, the boys didn't seem interested in what I was offering). I turned to look at the teacher but drank up as much as I could around the classroom. There were no windows, but there were cheerful posters pasted over the walls. The room was littered with textbooks. The boys were learning from a Smartboard and they scribbled notes with golf pencils.

"You're the tutor." Standing next to me was one of the boys.

I nodded. "I am."

"Good," he said, and immediately sat next to me. "I need help with introductions."

The student and I sat and worked on writing introductions to his essays for two hours that morning - that was the most normal part of my first morning at Rikers. He was so dedicated and wrote out new paragraphs over and over until he'd gotten it right. He promised to work with me again the next week, and I said I'd see if I could bring him any of my old essays.

"Introductions are hard. I struggle with them myself. Everyone does. It's just important that you have a hook and a thesis sentence. Then later when you wrap everything up, you can just summarize your introduction, and that's your conclusion." He'd nodded as I talked and his hand worked furiously over his paper.

At the end of the lesson an officer came to take the boys out of the classroom. I made small talk with the teacher and glanced outside to see where the door had been cracked. All of the boys were lined up with their palms against the wall as the two officers patted them down.

"They think I gave them something," I murmured, horrified.

The teacher rolled his eyes at me. "They do this every day."

I left Rikers that morning with a renewed sense of purpose. I waited for the bus to take me back to the main entrance in the heat of June, my eyes adjusting to the sunlight, perching on the box of bullets that sat outside. A monarch butterfly flew past me lazily. I laughed - it bubbled out of me before I even knew it was happening. What is this place?

Additional Rikers Drabbles

- As of September 2017, this writing was added to John Jay's publication "Fierce Advocate." You can find it here.

- I saw several female corrections officers during my first summer at Rikers. Later I advised a student who had told me she wanted to be a corrections officer but was worried she wouldn't succeed because she was a woman. I told her not to be; I saw female officers all the time. It's a unisex position.

- The student I worked with made dramatic progress in the short time I saw him. I'd given him a set of instructions and he'd repeated them back to me, then implemented them in his writing.

I was ecstatic. "That's exactly it! You did it exactly right. I'm so proud of you." His whole face lit up. I'm going to chase that. This is the best feeling in the world.

- After one of my sessions with that particular student was done for the day, the teacher blocked my exit. He'd asked me how it was going teaching him, and I reiterated how happy I'd been to see him progress.

"You can't sit that close to him," he'd told me. "It's still jail. I'd say at least two of them - maybe three - but at least two are probably in for murder."

"You still teach here," I'd said, my voice just a little stubborn, my tongue thick in my mouth.

He'd laughed. "I do."

- Once one of the students asked me what I studied in school. During my training, they'd encouraged me to be open with the students, because some of them "had never heard about education options before."

"I study - "

"Education!" One of them assumed.

No, darling. I'm studying you. 

- I visited Rikers with my Fellowship in August 2016. The facility was hot, to the point where I was sleepy. One of the younger officers told me there was no air conditioning in the facility.

"You'd think that would be a union concern," I'd mused. His face fell. "You'd think so."

Later, I addressed the heat with a high-ranking officer who for all the world tried to portray that Rikers was similar to a summer camp.

"Didn't you have a problem with this before?" I'd asked, head cocked, smile wide.

"Oh, yeah...what year was that?"

"September 2014."

"Yeah, well, bureaucracy." She'd smiled at me just as serenely. I felt my own smile go wooden. Bureaucracy. I'm gonna dismantle this whole goddamn island someday.