The Women's House of Detention by Hugh Ryan

Author:Hugh Ryan [Ryan, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2022-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

THE RIOTS RETURN

In the wake of the first riot, Commissioner of Corrections Anna Kross received much praise for trying to fix the correctional system, and the city certainly generated reams of reports, and hundreds of hours of meetings discussing its issues. But despite the changes, the House of D remained toxically overcrowded. The situation was so dire that, in 1957, the prison demolished a good portion of the hospital and replaced it with a dormitory-style room to house fifty women at once.52 This appeared to be a bit of realpolitik on Kross’s part. Without full hospital facilities, the House of D was able to get around a public-health law that had existed for as long as the prison had, which allowed “self-committed” drug addicts to request treatment from any city-operated hospital. In reality, these requests were mostly shunted to the House of D and the prison hospital for men on Rikers Island. Commissioner Kross, in a press release, called it “a bad practice… [as] we have no proper facilities for these non-criminal addicts. Nor are they given any proper medical treatment for their illness.”53 By turning the hospitals at both Rikers and the House of D into dorms, she hoped to force the city to fund real treatment facilities in real hospitals. This did happen, to some degree, but slowly, and not for many years. Instead, the House of D simply had fewer facilities and way more addicts. In 1958, just three years after it had been discontinued, the junkie tank was quietly reinstated.

In the year of the first riot, there were 7,644 admissions to the House of D—meaning 7,644 useless enemas and forced vaginal examinations. By 1958, the year the riots returned, that number had nearly doubled, to 13,356 admissions. During the 1954 riot, there were some 452 imprisoned people at the House of D; in 1958, there were 512—meaning 200 of them were doubled up in cramped, tiny cages, or smashed into a dormitory with no privacy whatsoever.

As a result, this time around, the riot was much bigger, as was the crowd watching. Thousands of people gathered around the prison on the night of Saturday, April 26, 1958, as the people inside shouted, fought guards, and “threw burning sheets and crockery” out of the windows.54 It took ten police officers and twelve firemen just to control the crowd, and additional male guards had to be sent from other prisons to restore order inside the House of D.55 This time, there was no way to cover up what had happened.

According to the press, the women’s main complaints were the lack of edible food and the fact that “their protests against the food had resulted only in beatings.”56 Commissioner Kross pushed back in the press; yes, she admitted, “the food budget had been cut,” but she denied that they were starving or abused for complaining about it. Instead, official reports painted the following picture:

The night of the riot, the prison was once again severely understaffed and overcrowded. On the sixth

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