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| banners by #ResistRikers |
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| photo by banners by #ResistRikers |
For as long as I can
remember, I’ve been terrified of the idea of solitary confinement. Reading memoires on the topic, Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arneas or
the stories of years of solitary confinement endured by the German Red
Army Faction, gave me chills. Many lost
their minds in their isolated rubber rooms.
Anarchists have long pointed out that every
prisoner is
a political prisoner. One doesn’t
have to look very hard to see that we have a huge, ever growing prison population,
some there because of poverty or the war on drugs, lack of housing or conviction
of petty crime, some three
percent of our population navigating the line between prison and parole. All the while our public housing and hospitals
are collapsing, or crumbling. So those on the outside find themselves caught
up. Many are adolescents; others
mentally ill. And there they are all treated like criminals,
locked away, often placed in solitary confinement, beaten or subject to brutal
discipline.
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Saturday, I posted a message to facebook, “hey peeps... a few of us are meeting at 388 Atlantic at the commons to ride together to the action. Join us at 1:30” or the Resisting Rikers rally.” The invite explained:
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 8
We return to #ResistRikers at the gates of NYC's jail complex with enough of
our allies to make the walls tremble.
Bring your voice, your banners, your friends and your family. All are invited to speak about their experiences.
Meet outside the Rikers sign at the corner of 19th Av & Hazen St, the take the Q100 bus from Queens Plaza (E-M-R) or the 21 ST Queensbridge (F) (see the Q100 route: http://tinyurl.com/o4e2f3s)
We support the people of Ferguson and their call for #FergusonOctober and we see the struggle for justice at Rikers as one of our parts to play in this effort.
See media from last rally.
NO to solitary confinement
NO to youth detention
NO to jailing mentally-ill people
NO to collaboration with ICE
NO to early lockdown
NO to officer abuse
NO to medical neglect
Bring your voice, your banners, your friends and your family. All are invited to speak about their experiences.
Meet outside the Rikers sign at the corner of 19th Av & Hazen St, the take the Q100 bus from Queens Plaza (E-M-R) or the 21 ST Queensbridge (F) (see the Q100 route: http://tinyurl.com/o4e2f3s)
We support the people of Ferguson and their call for #FergusonOctober and we see the struggle for justice at Rikers as one of our parts to play in this effort.
See media from last rally.
NO to solitary confinement
NO to youth detention
NO to jailing mentally-ill people
NO to collaboration with ICE
NO to early lockdown
NO to officer abuse
NO to medical neglect
OWS veteran, Cecily
McMillan, who spent 58 days in Rikers this summer, had
organized the event.
“Its barbaric to put anyone n solitary confinement,” I explained
to a friend outside the commons before riding over. “Thought we had rules against cruel and
unusual punishment.”
“That’s the truth,” noted a young woman on the sidewalk, walking
by.
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| rikers-island-approaching |
Riding the dozen from Atlantic Ave to Queens, a weird tension/
fear gripped my stomach, particularly, as I made my way down 20th street to the
facility, an eerie feeling along the open space.
“That’s a good bike ride,” noted Cecily when i arrived at the
welcome sign just before the bridge to the underground world of the US gulag.
People were carrying signs, hinging banners.
“Rikers = Death,” read one sign. Another noted the incidence of suicides taking
place there.
“Mass incarceration=the new Jim Crow.”
“Corrections Officers are Getting away with Murder”
“Mass incarceration = social control.”
“I eat every meal alone.”
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| Bridge to Rikers |
I asked Cecily what she
hoped to see. “I want to see us grow to 12,000, one for every person in
there. I want us to try to take over the
bridge. If they wont see them as people,
we’ll represent them as people.”
Standing there, I talked with several activists, including
Juanita, an elder African American women with a Black National Congress pin. She
had been upset before coming. That morning,
she had been doing a little background research on the conditions there. “Photos of kids with scars, burnt, beaten
and bleeding” she explained. Yet, she
was glad she came. Through such actions, we beat back that depressing feeling
she finished. “You don’t have done anything
you get that depressed feeling. Yet, action
equals life. Looking at Cecily and everyone else who was so energized
there, I think Juanita was right.
Social worker Joan E Roney noted. “As an environmental and human rights activist, I had to come out to demonstrate at Rikers. Prisons should not be a place of mental
health treatment. Prisons should not be
a place of education. Prisons should not
be the homes for our youth.”
Cecily made a statement to the press. “I was imprisoned at Rikers for 58 days because of my involvement
with OWS. March 27th, 2012, I was sexually assaulted by a police officer at
Zuccotti Park, was arrested, and had a grand maul seizure and was left for
dead.” After a long trial, McMillan was sentenced
two years later. “The horror of Rikers” takes place in countless ways she explained. “Rules change every day. The lights are on
all the time. Sleep deprivation is
constant. “She rattled off a list of other indignities. Strip searches, sexual assaults, sexual quid
pro quo’s. “Anything you can imagine. Getting sick can turn to death,” she explained,
recalling another prisoner who never got the proper treatment and died of complications
there. “She died of systematic organ failure. After I got out, one woman told me she would not
have known what happened to her sister if it wasn’t for my editorial
in
the NY Times (see below). We asked
for programs. Can we have basic conditions? The officers’ and prisoners need to be
treated as humans. Moving the problems to a consulting firm passes the buck.” Instead, McMillan suggested that people who have
been through Rikers be engaged as part of the solution. “Rather than create a bridge
to a secondary under class, talk to the families. You want to make changes, you need a community
review board, our own ad hoc community review board.”
A
quarter century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we’ve created a our own
walls between those on the inside and the outside, those on one side of the bridge
and the other, one side of the water and another, between the affluent and
those caught speaking out or without access to lawyers. A part of us, a part of what’s decent about
us is being diminished as
we watch so many shuffle through the revolving door between prison, parole, violation,
and re entry into our own gulag., without speaking out.
“If only it were all so simple! If only there
were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were
necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the
line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And
who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
The Opinion Pages | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
What I Saw
on Rikers Island
Cecily McMillan on Brutality and Humiliation on
Rikers Island
I RECENTLY served 58 days of a three-month sentence on Rikers
Island. I was convicted in May of assaulting a New York City police officer as
the police cleared Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street protesters in 2012. (I
am appealing my conviction.) I got a firsthand experience that I did not seek
of what it is like to live behind bars.
Rikers is a city jail; it holds some 11,000 inmates who are awaiting
trial or sentencing, or who have been convicted and sentenced to a year or less
of time.
During my incarceration, two correction officers were
arrested on charges of
smuggling contraband, including drugs, to inmates. The week after I was
released, two more correction officers and a
captain were arrested on charges of having
beaten a handcuffed prisoner into unconsciousness in 2012. Last week, The New
York Times reported on the “culture of brutality”
on Rikers. The city is nowinvestigating more than 100 reported violent assaults on
inmates.
None of this would surprise the inmates of the Rose M. Singer
Center, the women’s barrack on the island, who routinely experience or witness
brutality of all kinds.
On one day in May, I was waiting outside the jail pharmacy for
my daily A.D.H.D. prescription. A male officer began harassing me, and when I
made the mistake of looking at his badge to get his number, he slammed his body
into mine and shouted a sexual slur at me.
I wrote up a complaint and then showed it to my lawyer, but he
advised me not to file it, because of the risk of retaliation. Despite formal
rules governing the interactions between correction officers and inmates that
are detailed in the inmate handbook issued to everyone at intake, in reality we
had no rights and no recourse in these kinds of conflicts.
Violence is easy to grasp and to condemn. What’s harder to
understand for people who haven’t done time is the day-in, day-out degradation
and neglect.
Inmates are routinely denied basic medical treatment. I saw a
woman soiled with vomit and sobbing for hours. We other inmates were afraid and
concerned. We didn’t know what was happening, or what we could do. Finally, at
the insistence of a few inmates, she was taken to the hospital. She never came
back. Her name was Judith. She had befriended me before she died.
I fear for my jailhouse “madrina” (godmother), who remains on
Rikers. For more than a month, she has been asking to get a biopsy of a lump in
her throat, which she worries is a recurrence of the cancer she was treated for
years ago.
And then there is the ritual humiliation of the inmates — not
physical death, but death of the soul. Our dorm was searched at least twice a
month, and more often if the guards wanted to set an example. Two or three
captains, and about 10 officers, male and female, would file into the dorm in
full riot gear, wearing plexiglass masks and carrying big wooden bats.
Another set of female officers filed into the bathroom and stood
in a line facing the stalls, which lack doors. We were ordered to lie down on
our beds, face down, hands behind our backs. A third set of female officers
filed in.
After we put our green jumpsuits back on, we were marched into
the day room where we were ordered to stand facing the wall, sometimes for
hours, while the dormitory was searched, the bedding flipped over, our personal
possessions ransacked. Then a work detail of inmates went into the dormitory
and swept all our “unapproved” belongings — fruit, pens, extra blankets — into
trash bags. The aftermath reminded me of what it was like to come home after a
hurricane in southeast Texas, where I grew up.
In the face of inhumanity, many of the women I shared quarters
with were amazingly resilient and caring. They looked after one another, and
they looked after me.
In March, Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed Joseph Ponte as the
city’s new correction commissioner. By reputation, Mr. Ponte, formerly the head
of the Department of Corrections in Maine, is a reformer. He recently told
Times reporters that Rikers Island needed change to “really bring it into the
21st century.” But he denied that Rikers had “a culture of violence.” I
disagree.
Fixing the prison system won’t be quick or easy. But in the
short term, things could be done to improve conditions on Rikers. Before I
left, I asked the other inmates what changes they would make. They had many
ideas. Here are two.
Upon intake, every inmate should receive a physical and
psychological examination, as well as medication and treatment as needed. (I
waited three weeks before receiving that daily prescription medication, which I
had been taking before I was incarcerated.) While in jail, each prisoner should
be guaranteed access to a doctor within 24 hours, as well as emergency medical
help — such action, I believe, could have saved Judith’s life.
And inmates need to be able to file grievances about
mistreatment without fear of retaliation. The rules governing ordinary
interactions between inmates and correction officers, as well as the process
for filing grievances, seem all too often to describe an alternate reality
where interactions are calm, orderly and reasonably respectful.
But what I saw and experienced on Rikers was far more chaotic
and arbitrary. Yes, the women and men on Rikers have been accused or convicted
of crimes — but that does not mean that they should be deprived of their basic
rights to safety and care.
Post Script.
A few weeks after our rally, the NY Tmes posted an update.
Cecily commented on facebook.
Post Script.
A few weeks after our rally, the NY Tmes posted an update.
Cecily commented on facebook.
