Rikers, what good do you think you do? – The Brooklyn Rail

Jarrod Shanahan
Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York Metropolis Hostage
(Verso Books, 2022)

When Johnny Money carried out for the inmates of San Quentin jail in 1969, he wrote a music particularly for the event. The primary a number of verses ask why the jail exists and what good it may presumably do for these imprisoned there or society as an entire. Its final verse concludes, to a roar of applause:

San Quentin, might you rot and burn in hell
Could your partitions fall and should I dwell to inform
Could all of the world neglect you ever stood
And will all of the world remorse you probably did no good.

On the time, the music was thought-about naïve pandering. This was nonetheless the period wherein liberal lecturers and politicians believed in “penal welfarism,” that America’s carceral establishments may very well be remodeled into one thing higher than the torturous dungeons described by Money. A notable instance was the deliberate enlargement of New York’s Rikers Island from a small penal work camp to a state-of-the-art facility of human rehabilitation. Jarrod Shanahan’s Captives, the primary historical past of Rikers written in what could also be its remaining years, explains why the mission failed, why renewed progressive efforts to interchange amenities like Rikers at the moment will fail once more, and why Money was in all probability proper.

The e-book opens with an inmate rebellion at New York Metropolis’s Home of Detention for Ladies (HDW) in 1954—certainly one of many riots described with the visceral element with which Invoice Buford depicted soccer-hooligan avenue brawls in Among the many Thugs. The ability-wide chants and miniature arsons alerted Greenwich Village passers-by, and finally the sympathetic ears of the media, and then-recently-appointed Division of Corrections (DOC) commissioner Anna M. Kross. To her, the conspicuously harmful and unsanitary circumstances of HDW had been emblematic of the town’s eighteenth-century system of jails she had been tasked to modernize. Declaring that the previous jails couldn’t be reformed, Kross introduced {that a} new central jail, designed by humanitarian lecturers and run by psychologists and social staff, would exchange them on Rikers Island. Arriving inmates could be evaluated, categorized, directed to the precise form of knowledgeable, and assigned to a program primarily based on no matter kind of assist they should go away the power as a productive member of society. It might be a mannequin for the way forward for jails that may look extra like social emergency rooms than warehouses for surplus inhabitants. As soon as accomplished, she believed, Rikers could be the pleasure of New York Metropolis.

An early signal of bother for Kross’s plan got here a decade later. With a brand new girls’s jail beneath building on Rikers, HDW was as soon as once more rocked by scandal. Peace activist Andrea Dworkin printed an exposé of the horrors of day by day life inside HDW, apparently unabated because the 1954 riot. This time Kross’s DOC was much less sympathetic, and new voices spoke as much as defend her work: the assorted non secular, scholar, and activist nonprofits and NGOs that Kross had launched to the power as a part of her plan to wrestle management of the jails away from the merciless and apathetic correction officers. As a substitute of taking a powerful stand towards brutality, the non secular leaders and representatives of the Ladies’s Jail Affiliation and the Society for Moral Tradition claimed Dworkin was exaggerating or mendacity.

Regardless of the vital advocacy work these teams typically present for inmates, Shanahan observes, these nonprofits function on the pleasure of the power’s administration, and are thus unwilling to problem successfully the day-to-day merciless and weird extra of incarceration. “Finally,” he writes, “these nonprofits haven’t any alternative however to facilitate the perpetuation and enlargement of carceral establishments, lending them ideological cowl and sensible assist beneath the auspices of doing good deeds.”

At their highest ranges, Shanahan argues, the corporate-funded prison-reform NGOs just like the Ford Basis and Vera Institute for Justice hope to reshape prisons to allow them to be efficient establishments of social engineering: criminals could be remodeled into compliant staff for industries experiencing shortages.

However at the same time as their affect inside the penal paperwork elevated, the visions the NGOs shared with Kross had been blocked by the paramilitary energy of the true authority in metropolis jails: the guards. Bolstered by a brand new grassroots right-wing motion referred to as Help Your Native Police (SYLP), the guards reimagined themselves as troopers on the entrance line of a struggle towards city riots, avenue gangs, crime, drug dependancy, and revolutionary wrestle. Trials for police or guard brutality had been met by SYLP activists and swarms of off-duty cops and guards in spectacular and infrequently violent exhibits of solidarity. Finally police and guard unions merged right into a separate Uniformed Forces Coalition, a far-right labor-bargaining group of NYPD, FDNY, housing police, and jail guards—who had been typically conspicuously armed—that negotiated individually from different metropolis workers.

A remaining nail within the coffin of the penal welfarist dream got here with the fiscal disaster of the seventies. Years earlier than New York Metropolis confronted chapter, inmates had been the primary to undergo punishing cuts in wages, companies, work packages, meals, and primary hygiene. Shells of their unique blueprints, the brand new Brutalist Rikers cellblocks had been full of an rising variety of bunks to maintain up with skyrocketing arrests all through the crumbling metropolis. By the mid-seventies, politicians like Ed Koch ran TV adverts exhibiting empty jail beds he promised to fill as soon as in workplace. In only a few years’ time, it appeared that it was Kross, not Money, who was naïve.

Victorious towards plans to interchange them with social staff, the guards handled the expanded Rikers like their island fortress. Subsequent makes an attempt by the DOC or judges to rein of their energy with oversight or humanitarian reforms had been met with more and more daring wildcat strikes. Shanahan describes probably the most dramatic of those actions, the 1990 seizure of the bridge to Rikers by dozens of correction officers, drunk and decided to brutalize anybody who tried to cross, even paramedics. The blockade starved inmates to the purpose of one other determined riot, which was in flip shortly put down by indiscriminate beatings.

Contradicting a place generally taken by jail abolitionists, Shanahan argues that cops and guards are certainly staff, however staff with a uniquely reactionary worldview ensuing from their career, wherein human lives are handled as uncooked materials. As was typically the case with such protests, the central demand of the bridge blockade was the tip of any oversight of how and after they meted out violence. The zealotry that terrified New Deal-era bureaucrats like Kross was now an ideal match for the disciplinary neoliberal financial restructuring of the seventies and eighties. Outcasts of the manufacturing course of may very well be handled as delinquent components driving city decay as an alternative of the particular culprits, the finance, insurance coverage, and actual property (FIRE) tycoons pushing slash-and-burn austerity.

Shanahan, a former inmate at Rikers, appears to please in interrupting his account of the grotesque dealings among the many metropolis, guards, and judges with gripping tales of prisoner escapes and uprisings. In a single, a person with a damaged leg leaves his solid behind as a decoy to make it seem as if he’s nonetheless in mattress. In one other, the Puerto Rican revolutionary William Morales, his palms and imaginative and prescient destroyed by a defective explosive, tumbles from a Bellevue Hospital window into the arms of his comrades, who evacuate him to Cuba, the place he lives to today. The uprisings, alternatively, don’t produce such joyful outcomes. And but, each dozen pages or so, they maintain taking place—a chilling testomony to how insupportable day by day circumstances should be.

Conserving the work historic, there may be solely a short point out of the motion towards Rikers at the moment. The #CLOSErikers coalition fashioned in 2016 when the tales of Kalief Browder—who dedicated suicide at age twenty-two after spending two years in solitary confinement for allegedly stealing a backpack—and later, Layleen Polanco—a transgender lady who died of a seizure in solitary in 2019—renewed condemnation of Rikers’s reliance on torture. With Ford Basis funds, the coalition efficiently pushed a plan by metropolis authorities that may relocate Rikers’s inmates to 4 new “neighborhood jails”—described with all of the optimism with which Kross had imagined Rikers.

However a large a part of that coalition had been abolitionists. Calling themselves No New Jails NYC, they broke towards the plan with a counterproposal: that the eleven billion {dollars} for brand spanking new amenities needs to be spent as an alternative on social packages that would cut back the underlying causes of crime. They agreed that Rikers needs to be closed, however insisted that it needs to be changed with nothing. Following the Motion for Black Lives, the place that jails merely don’t work was approaching grassroots consensus among the many progressive left. Nonetheless, it was referred to as naïve, even inhumane, by the NGO advocates of the brand new jails, even those that had tailored the newly widespread language of abolition.

The wrestle to regulate Rikers, Shanahan writes, is a wrestle for the town itself. If that’s the case, it might appear the town is run by a fluid alliance of those NGO leaders, metropolis bureaucrats, law enforcement officials, and company overlords, sure collectively, regardless of their often competing pursuits, by a perception that prisons ought to proceed in perpetuity. Whereas he doesn’t go as far as to supply an abolitionist program in Captives, his historical past of Rikers convincingly demonstrates that there is no such thing as a different logical different to the horrors of prisons and jails than to interrupt with the social order they characterize.