Rikers by Graham Rayman & Reuven Blau

Author:Graham Rayman & Reuven Blau [Rayman, Graham & Blau, Reuven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

On August 12, 1969, a seventeen-year-old detainee named Rodney Brown hanged himself in the teen jail. The Brooklyn youth had been arrested for robbery. He snaked a belt around his neck and tied it to a light fixture in a housing block with 379 detainees staffed by two officers. In detailing Brown’s death, the state senator John Dunne noted he was being held only because his family couldn’t afford bail. “I think the mayor [John Lindsay] should show a little concern for them,” Dunne said.

Four months later, six NYU graduate students in social work sent a letter to the media, as well as President Nixon and Governor Nelson Rockefeller, decrying the use of Rikers to house teen detainees. “The Rikers Island reformatory is a dumping ground,” one student told The New York Times. “The boys there are making a last cry for help and nobody’s listening.”

In response, the city correction commissioner, George McGrath, described the students as “immature young people…making faulty judgments.”

In 1972, the city opened a new jail on Rikers for teen males dubbed the Adolescent Reception and Detention Center (ARDC), but little really changed.

By 2008, ARDC had been renamed the Robert N. Davoren Center (RNDC), at that point a thirty-six-year-old relic in poor condition and riven with violence. The beating death of eighteen-year-old Christopher Robinson by gang members essentially deputized by correction officers there in October of that year became a seminal moment. And the city paid out $2 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Robinson’s family.

The case exposed something called “the Program,” where gang members controlled housing units with the ignorance or tacit approval of staff. The practice predictably led to pages of broken bones and slashed faces. DOC officials often shrugged and said that teens were simply the most violent of detainees.

Once again, little changed, until the case of Kalief Browder, arrested for stealing a backpack and held for three years in RNDC from age seventeen to twenty. After the charges were dropped, Browder hanged himself at age twenty-two in 2015. His loss crystallized much that was wrong with Rikers and fueled the Close Rikers movement.

—

JACQUELINE VELEZ, detained 1998: I wouldn’t say that my upbringing prepared me for Rikers; I would say it led me there. I grew up in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I grew up very poor. While you’re eating a bowl of cereal, you see two antennas sticking out the box, like, “Oh my God, I just ate something that roaches were all over.” As I became a teenager, there were always mice. My mom fed us out of cans, Spam and corned beef. And those were treats sometimes.

By the time I was sixteen, I was a high school dropout, but I had never even been to high school. I was just registered. I would go to “Hooky Jams,” hooky parties in the daytime, when someone’s mother was working. I was definitely not going to school.

I had one cousin I hung out with and he had a whole bunch of guy friends and they were looking for their girl gang.

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