Life and Death in Rikers Island by Homer Venters

Author:Homer Venters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2019-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

Race

Kalief Browder

KALIEF BROWDER WAS 16 when he was arrested in the Bronx. Walking home from a party along Arthur Avenue with a friend, several police cars swarmed toward them, one containing a man who reported being robbed of his backpack. Kalief and his friend said that they hadn’t done anything and showed their empty pockets to prove the point. Then the story changed, and the victim in the police cruiser said that he had been robbed weeks earlier, not that night. He identified Kalief and his friend as the culprits. Both of them were arrested and arraigned on robbery and assault changes. Kalief received bail of $3,000, which his family could not raise. The high bail stemmed from a prior guilty plea in a joyriding case, for which he was given a “youthful offender” status and probation. In every state except for New York and North Carolina, this series of events likely would have resulted in either a referral back to community probation or detention in a juvenile facility. But New York and North Carolina are the two remaining states where 16- and 17-year-olds are routinely remanded to the adult jail system while they await trial. A reform movement known as “Raise the Age” hopes to end this practice but hadn’t even started in earnest when Kalief was arrested.1 Within 24 hours of being stopped on the street, Kalief Browder made the frightening journey across the bridge to Rikers Island in a Department of Correction bus. He was headed to the Robert N. Davoren Complex (RNDC), the notorious jail for adolescents, where Christopher Robinson was killed two years earlier in an attack sanctioned by correction officers.2 The depth of brutality in this jail would prompt investigation by the US Department of Justice, which would find that “adolescent inmates at Rikers are not adequately protected from harm, including serious physical harm from the rampant use of unnecessary and excessive force by DOC staff.” 3 In her description of Kalief’s case in the New Yorker, Jennifer Gonnerman documents the violent and chaotic setting Kalief was dropped into.4 His housing area was controlled by gangs who seemed to operate with the open acquiescence of security staff, and the only way to survive was to keep to himself and then fight when challenged. For newly arriving adolescents, there was an immediate need to establish a pecking order. That meant frequent challenges and brutal fights.

This dynamic was first revealed to me with the death of Christopher Robinson in RNDC in 2008. For him, the consequences of not fitting into this hierarchy of housing area violence were fatal. In his case, correction officers in RNDC openly conspired with a group of inmates to extort, assault, and otherwise abuse adolescents in the jail. This conspiracy was widely known as “The Program” and involved both correction officers actively participating in crimes and others turning a blind eye. Christopher Robinson resisted the efforts by this group to extort money from him, and consequently he was beaten to death in his cell.

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