From Ramallah to Rikers Island
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Cover Story
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| Nigel Parry | Nov. 20, 2008 | 1:40 AM |
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Waking was often extremely traumatic. The moment of realizing where I was was like a punch in the stomach.
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How Occupation In One Land Led To Incarceration In America
On 25 May 1998, I arrived to my home in Ramallah to find a mob of armed Palestinians inside my house, including members of the Palestinian security forces. All my belongings were scattered in the yard outside, and a bulldozer had leveled part of my bedroom walls and roof.
Covering The Hard Places Within
10 February 2007 — I’ve never shirked from writing about the difficult aspects of my life, although I will confess to not having spent as much time as I would have liked covering the hard places within.
Writing about Palestine was one thing; writing about Palestine within me and how it has played out through me is something I have increasingly begun to consider in depth. And it’s about time.
An adoption, an abusive school environment, two divorces, four years in a war zone including surviving a home demolition—and something had to give. And give it did this last Christmas, in an overwhelming sense of dread that culminated in a posttraumatic flashback/psychotic episode of sorts.
The four years I lived in Palestine, in the second half of the 1990s, did not see the same levels of violence that have characterized the Second Intifada. Nonetheless, I lived through periods of extreme violence and, additionally, actively sought out violent clashes to photograph and document. It was in September 1996 when Israeli tanks first circled Ramallah, when armed members of the Palestinian Authority first shot back at Israeli soldiers and when, in one day, Sept. 25, in one town, Israel shot dead four and injured 263.
After the demolition of my home in May 1998, I spent a week getting death threats and watching friends get death threats, surrounded by dusty belongings and rubble, sleeping in the garden or an impossible-to-secure home in which every door was intentionally and systematically destroyed. Until you stand on the rubble of your home, you don’t realize how much of your piece of mind and security of self are tied up in seemingly inanimate bricks. It did not matter that I was only renting the building. It was my home and destroying it destroyed part of me. It was not until it happened to me that I truly grasped how terrible the practice of home demolition is.
Even so, to consider that trauma stems solely from witnessing or experiencing direct violence would be a mistake. Military occupation is by definition intrusive and traumatizing. Friends and colleagues disappear seemingly randomly into timeless detention. Your route to work or school is blocked for weeks on end, leaving you to stew. Entire cities are punished. Thousand year old trees are bulldozed. The entire environment is insidiously stressful and takes a brutal toll, especially over years.
Throughout all of this, the account of reality that the media offers, bears no relation to what you can see with your own eyes. You realize that you, and all those around you, have been abandoned by the world in a landscape populated by real and murderous monsters. If you were working for a local organization rather than an international NGO like the UN, you’d be lucky to clear $1,000 a month.
This leaves you unable to get out of the country for a vacation to take a break and, when you finally do leave the country, you have no health insurance and are probably not even aware of the damage inside. Hey, you survived!
All of which led us to Christmas 2006...
In January 2006, a friend and neighbor burned to death in a house fire two doors down. Shortly after Christmas, almost a year later, while moving material from my van parked in front of the still-charred door, I became overwhelmed with the feeling that my apartment building was on fire and began breaking a neighbor’s door down.
Her screams from inside the apartment told a different story and snapped me out of the episode instantly, as I hadn’t been trying to hurt her but save her from a non-existent fire. Some dark e-mails around the same time to someone else, warning of impending doom, and you get the picture—a mess.
The following day, I left a letter of explanation and apology outside the neighbor’s door, on top of a new multimedia system (it was Christmas!) and unintentionally violated an order of protection that had not been explained adequately to me.
She chose to press charges for both incidents.
I was taken to Bellevue Hospital on Dec. 29, where I was detained for almost a month before being brought to Rikers Island Correctional Facility at the end of January, from where I am writing this.
While many of the inmates in the main prison population that I exist in were not functioning too well outside, few were dangerous to society at large in any immediate way. I have been reflexively guilty of assuming that prisons basically were doing the job one hopes they do, namely keeping us safe from dangerous people. It sure was easy to be an armchair incarceration expert from outside the walls of Rikers Island. Yet the people around me don’t fit that mold.
What the last two weeks have certainly been about—for me—is a walk through one of the traps set for America’s poor, a trap which makes politicians look like they’re doing something to keep us safe from crime while doing none of the sort.
If most people arrived here at the thorny end of the path as the result of broken homes, a breakdown of community and opportunities, held down by poverty and myopic government policies and a ghetto wall that no one dares confront, then there is nothing in prison to remedy that lack of love.
Prison is about walls, rules, rejection and negation. You are not the point. Only the system matters. Which was the problem to begin with. If you didn’t arrive here with the tools to dig yourself out, don’t expect to find them inside these walls.
In fact, don’t expect to find a blanket for your first week.
Guilty Until Proven Guilty: Swallowed By Jail
11 February 2007 — After a month in Bellevue Hospital, where I had already experienced incarceration, news came through the system’s grapevine that I was to be arrested on the same day I was to be released. Despite the passage of time, and a month of medication, the system was not done with you just yet. The crushing disappointment was too much.
I spent the afternoon in the 30th Precinct in Harlem listening to cops talking about the new overtime-based salaries, as they left my transfer to central booking to the last possible, prime, overtime moment. One of the detectives who arrested me was being paid over $120,000 a year. The changes could explain why so many of my police, judicial and correctional processes took place at night. The court took place well after midnight. Rikers Island processed me overnight. The machine has adjusted well to the loosening of its financial shackles. It’s the same machine, however.
Manhattan’s Central Booking facility and the accompanying “Tombs” jail date back to 1838 and, although the structure has been replaced several times, the ambiance of the basement prison doesn’t seem to have changed that much. Long, oppressive stone corridors and heavy iron gates set the tone, a gothic backdrop for a motley collection of late night drunks and brawling tourists, nervously waiting to be swallowed into the earth. Handcuffs dig deep. The junkies sleep where they sprawl.
Deeper into the catacombs. Searches. Cops shouting at us.
“Stand here!”
“On that line!”
Everyone being led there bemused and stunned, some very familiar with the process. Medical “screening” cursory. Finally, the “tombs” themselves, the cells.
15 foot by 15 foot. Spit and piss on the cold concrete floor, hard wooden benches too narrow to sleep on, and of course no blankets. No stall walls to the toilets. Get used to your smell. Shit in front of your cell mates. 24/7 strip lighting.
I spent two sleepless days and nights inside this cell until my exhausted body fell, dog-like, onto the concrete for a few hours of unconsciousness. Zombies inhabit these spaces. I met a 60-year-old man and his son who had been there for three days. They looked dazed.
I hallucinated at times. I made up stories from the shape of paint chips on the ground. One looked like my dog, Roo. I imagined walking him.
Parts of my self simply died to endure what was happening. I prayed a lot. There was nothing left to do to stop imploding. I was about to spend a very weird 70-80 hours in a kind of turbulent, jet stream peace.
In the Tombs, they make you beg for toilet paper. Evidence of “innocent until proven guilty” does not exist here. We are all treated as if we were guilty. The male or female corrections officers who eventually respond to your desperate calls will be sure to remind you that you are “in jail,” as if toilet paper was a treat.
There are no clocks on the walls. You are not informed of any timetables. You can feel yourself getting sick. Court is coming, judgment is coming... sometime.
After midnight, days into the experience, I was taken to the court above the basement tombs. I don’t remember what was said, as I was exhausted.
I made a very costly averaging mistake when talking about income that set my bail at an impossibly high $8,000. I signed some papers. And then I was handcuffed, led out into a cold, dark parking lot, and put on a bus to Rikers Island.
I was never told explicitly where I was being taken. You get to work it out yourself by overhearing the guards talking to each other. Informing you what is happening next is not on their radar. Not knowing what is next is the norm in jail. It’s hard to explain how disorienting and scary this is when it’s happening to you.
The change was a relief. The sight of the ferry man over the River Styx would have been a relief at that point. After two nights and days on a phlegm-covered stone floor, with no blanket, the promise of a bed was all that mattered.
How naive of me. Another night on a stone floor and another day awake in a holding cell were all that waited.
Prison buses are not the kind of vehicle you would want reviewed by anyone who has a problem with cramped coach seating on airplanes.
Predominant design media: metal.
Seat cushions: metal.
Ergonomics: square metal.
Ambience: metal.
View: metal grille.
Accessories: metal handcuffs, uncomfortably rear-cuffed for this jour-
ney.
Induction into real jail properly introduces you to the concept of “pens” or “bullpens” that temporary holding facilities such as the Tombs contain. In a real jail, pens perform the function of holding groups of prisoners between mass processing actions such as ID photographing. Mass intakes of detainees involve shuffles through several of these pens over many hours. Hurry up and wait.
It was more piss-stinking concrete and little sleep as we were
photographed, stripped naked and searched, surrendered “contraband” (cash, belts, pens, etc), and had our hoods slashed—to deny anonymity to any inmate who tried to slash or stab another and deny warmth to the rest of us. I had never been strip-searched before. It was all people ever said it was.
This marked night three of virtually no sleep since I had been taken to the Tombs at night. I managed an hour or so, falling exhausted. The more tired you became, the pain of sleeping on the concrete floor mattered less—at least for an hour or so, until you were less exhausted and the hard floor woke you up again. There were no blankets for us.
We were taken in the morning to the Medical Clinic bullpens where I met a 50-year-old Caucasian man called Randolf. He explained the lay of the land as patients freely exchanged piss to ensure positive drug tests—and therefore Methadone treatment—and freely sold drugs. A guard warned us that he wouldn’t help us if we got ripped off buying drugs.
Eventually, after much of the day, we were led through a parade of doctors and medical staff for a series of legally required questions that no one cared about the answers to. I was stuck with a TB test needle without any announcement, even after declaring that I had already taken the lifetime antibiotic treatment for it. That would hurt like hell later.
I was asked if I wanted a flu shot. After thinking where I had been sleeping the last few days and where I was heading, I consented. I was given the shot, then asked to sign something saying I had read a form that I had not been given. I pointed this out. The nurse tried to misread the text in front of me, to me—as if I couldn’t read—to speed the process. I didn’t care anymore. She didn’t care. I signed.
My experiences are not the exception. They are the norm. It is said that societies are judged on how they treat their weakest members. Prisoners and the mentally ill, stripped of all rights and control of their life, are in a terribly vulnerable position. Is how we are treating them making our world better or worse, safer or more dangerous?
As night approached, finally a dormitory room with a mattress but still no blanket, four days and three nights after my arrest. It was a cold winter, I was sick at this point, with a raging case of flu coming on. I would be faced with the choice of enduring uncomfortable hours in pens to wait for disinterested doctors, or braving it out in the dormitory in a bed.
At this stage, literally more exhausted than I had ever been in my life, I chose the latter. After a couple of days, I managed to secure a cup and a blanket. With the cup, I mixed boiled water and orange peels for vitamin C and tried to sleep as much as possible. When I slept, I had normal dreams of being in another situation, then woke up to bars and (often) chaos. It was like hitting the floor. Waking was often extremely traumatic. The moment of realizing where I was like a punch in the stomach.
In this system, regardless of what you have done or not done, you are presumed and treated as guilty until proven guilty. If you have a problem with that, the corrections officers in your dorm will be sure to remind you that “you shouldn’t have come to jail.”
11 February 2007 — Confinement is frightening. For sure everyone, at different stages in their lives, has had to cope with different levels of constriction. But full-on, uncompromising, adult confinement is utterly terrifying.
There is no “Okay, I’ll get up and do something else now.” There is no “I’ll go take a walk and come back to this later.” There is only a massive iron, stone and steel barrier that doesn’t even need to start a conversation with you. You can talk to it as much as you want, but you aren’t going anywhere.
Once you realize that there is no reasoning with this reality, this immutable fact, and that there is only coming to terms with where you are ahead, this is the point at which fear begins. Your journey will be within because there is nowhere else left to go. As you cast off, with no choice to do anything else, you are resigning yourself to confrontation with one of the deepest human fears—the loss of control.
Cops and jails and courts and prisons solve nothing, bar a genuine need for a safe confinement mechanism for the tiny minority of pathologically violent individuals.
As I sat in a cell in Precinct 30 in Harlem on Jan. 25, an optical illusion put the bars around the detectives outside, not around me. A metaphor for seeing our relative positions in a more enduring, more powerful social order?
D.H. Lawrence’s short poem, Self-Pity, says:
I never saw a wild thing / sorry for itself / A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough /without ever having felt sorry for itself
And I did not. The state I found myself in was beyond self pity. Parts of my self simply died to endure what was happening. I literally shook and shivered my way through illness and a series of powerful barriers of fear in my first week at Rikers. Again, this was not a self-pity process but a straight up stripping of illusions. The walls weren’t going anywhere, so I needed to adjust.
And I needed to understand the process I was going through. As a volunteer, I’d spent time in prisons in the Far East, the Middle East, and Europe. Never as a prisoner.
A large part of the violence of confinement, the assault it carries out on the human soul, is the sheer sense of waste it forces upon people. The more highly functional you were outside, the more severe the shock.
Forget even functional phone access. As I measured the lost hours, days and weeks for current and future clients, including child abuse prevention and poverty relief networks, I wanted to literally throw myself at the solid walls, to hurt myself, to register in some symbolic way the utter pointlessness and damage that my incarceration, at the hands of the system, was doing to the society that created it.
After one month in Bellevue Hospital, at the end of which I was recommended for release, what would my continued incarceration at a non-therapeutic facility achieve? Not being able to earn money, I have already lost my home at this point.
In any case, a police search made it look like my bulldozed home in Palestine, somewhere I could never live after that level of violation. Many of my personal effects and all of my work tools are now in police custody. All that was “mine” is once again violated and gone, 9 years later.
Now, tens of thousands of dollars in debt, my business is in tatters. And I have yet to be found ‘guilty’ of anything. The feelings of wanting to smash into the wall were real. Their opposite, the positive forces that get me out of bed in the morning to work for good and change are real. Caging and crippling this positive force produced a similar and contrary tidal movement that turned in on itself.
All of the balance, disturbed as it already was by the events around Christmas, was teetering and became more to just let go. A good thing? We’ll see on the other side.
In the meantime, I am left with nothing but time to mull over how easy it is to pick up the phone, call the police, and unleash hell on a life in America.
If that person does not have money or a good support network of friends in town to deal with things like bail and lawyers, then they’re going to be unprepared for the sudden way that you are plucked from everything you control in your life and put away somewhere where you can only watch it drive off the cliff.
Dealing With Distress
Time is the main arena in which the waste of confinement clumsily finger-paints out the windows of your shrinking mental home. The stress this induces can be dealt with in one of two ways—as there is nothing else to do here—exercise or sleep. Exercise is a release valve for time’s pressure cooker. Sleep takes it off the burner for a few hours of blessed unconsciousness.
If the physical confines of your jail environment are not big enough to allow for decent pacing, alternatives such as homemade weights are possible, but slow burn exercise such as pacing is far better as it burns time as well as energy. Big cats that pace in small zoo cages know this very well.
The prison system is 100% dedicated to your confinement, 100% dedicated to the belief that it is somehow ‘worthwhile’, that ‘it works’ on some level. The people around me certainly have no respect for this logic; it is just another form of societal exclusion.
No new lessons are learned here apart from that society really likes to speak in barriers. With nouns formed from walls, and verbs fashioned from gates and doors, a message is being spoken that is nothing new, inspires no one, and will change nothing for the better.
If the poor and the young who we shepherd through these prison gates need to hear anything, it is the opposite of what we have been telling them with this place—that there is something beyond all this negation, and this superficial and brutal communication.
That is the new song they are desperately wanting to hear, a melody of hope, carrying lyrics of truth and justice, bound together with a chorus of love. A song of freedom and vision to pull them out of our lack of hope that ensnared them and brought them here.
I learned to save everything. A discarded piece of plastic here could become a shower head tomorrow. Little is wasted, apart from your time, spent finding solutions to things that were not problems outside. It’s not enough to deprive you of your liberty: the only thing that truly matters when all is said and done—dignity—must also be stripped from you at every level.
The razor wire outside looks pretty in the sun, shining silver as planes from nearby LaGuardia Airport buzz overhead.
There have been some sheer moments of light in prison. In Two Main, the intake dorm I was in for the first week, I asked Payne, a Jamaican guy from my neighborhood in Harlem, who the woman was in the corner bed.
It was a weird dormitory, surrounded by people detoxing from heroin and crack, so I was ready for any answer. We had already decided, in accent terms, that Jamaicans were the Scottish of the Carribean:
Nigel: Who is that woman in the corner?
Payne: She got addict, man.
Nigel: She got addicted to what? To smack?
Payne: No, man! She got a dick! A dick!
For those who move on, there is the “opportunity” of breaking up the monotony. The days of prison license plate manufacture and mailbag sewing are not gone. Both these activities are available in longer term facilities—ie. prisons, not jails—and a new corporate version awaits.
Corporations such as McDonalds, Revlon, IBM and Honda hire prisoners across the United States, and pay them 95¢ an hour in an environment unencumbered by minimum wage and other workplace rights. A form of legal, indentured servanthood for those prisoners who want to make some dollars.
In jail, with food and provisions intentionally very minimalist and many institutions banning visitors from bringing in food or any ‘luxury items’, the Commissary is a very important institution. And prices are no different to those found on the streets, or are higher. 35¢ Ramen noodles. 65¢ Snickers. Even in prison, there are “luxuries” and bling, and we will strive for them inside just like we do on the outside.
14 February 2007 — The simple things that hold our world in place can be so easily dislodged. Yesterday, Doob, an African American inmate, told me how his parole violation (not returning home for curfew) had fired a missile at his family. His parole officer had attempted to argue his case—with his otherwise fine record—but the higher ups were not having it. And so, his newborn son has yet to look up and gaze into the eyes from which he came.
For a while, I’m back from the brink. Yesterday was yard exercise. It was an hour of walking anti-clockwise around a running track in freezing winter wind, and I have few warm clothes, but it helped more than it hurt. Today there is an ice storm outside. Food has been bad, so little sleep. But a pen arrived, which saved today. Exercise, sleep, and writing are the troika that help me cope in here.
Every day is another battle in an unending war. It never ends. There is no final “breaking free”, just the feeling of endlessly treading water and not drowning.
The System And The Solution
Some people left the dormitory, more arrived to take their place. Only the system stays the same.
One new guy asked where he could get a cup and a fork. I handed him two spares that I had collected for this very purpose, not even getting into how long these two objects had taken to acquire.
He’s asking all the new jack questions, even though he’s spent time here before, he says. It’s amazing how irritating those questions can get, even though that was you a couple of weeks ago.
But of course, I made it easy for him. Our kindness is what provides the cushion for that very cold reality that waits for people in here. On the outside, we call that kindness “society”.
In here, where even the simplest trappings of society are fought for and won hard, you get to see how much that kindness shines. The crack in everything, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, is how the light gets in.
The homeless guy who gave me one of his sheets when I was sick and had no blanket. The ones who offered a T-shirt, or socks, when they saw I only came in with the clothes on my back. The person who shared precious coffee with me before a friend outside was able to go through a tortuous process of paying money into my inmate account.
It’s these people, the ones who have fallen hard and got up to try again, that you want in your corner when the shit goes down. There are many good people here. They have problems and they need our help, not this soul-destroying caging.
It is our ignorance and fear of what lies inside human hearts that makes us shrink away and want to throw away the keys. The solution is more intimate than that.
While I rushed to get my ducks in a row, I failed to notice the graceful swan swimming directly towards me. It was singing a song of loneliness and desire and longing across the water, and I was deaf to its beautiful music.
I needed to be on a different timetable for my healing. I needed to be spending more time with friends, and less time working.
Firstly, it reminds me to be more gentle with those people around me which are going through their own painful processes.
Secondly, it encourages me not to forget to let loose or, in plain English:
1. Never forget mercy. You will most likely need it next.
2. Party like a rock star.
You Can't Help But Get Sick
18 February 2007 — The lack of means to keep yourself clean has serious implications in a dorm room situation where many of the detainees are here for the “three hots and a cot” respite from winter streets. This segment of society already suffers a higher than average rate of illness. In a closed environment, with other problematic conditions, the percentage of ill inmates is therefore higher than average.
Even during the worst periods in the war zone of Palestine, and there were some very bad times between 1994 and 1998, the subsequent Second Intifada notwithstanding, I was never suffering from skin ailments. Here, three weeks into Rikers, I began to develop eczema on the backs of my hands and wrists. Looking at that, and knowing there was nothing that could be done about it, was very hard to cope with.
The absolute legal minimum and—I am confident—many points below that bare legal minimum of mandated human care is the reality being practiced on Rikers Island. Several of the old timer inmates have used a familiar legal phrase to describe their treatment here—‘cruel and unusual punishment’.
From the terrible food, cold dorms, and inadequate provision of primary healthcare products, to the formulaic medical and psychiatric interviews that take place at the main Medical Clinic, human rights are not respected here. People held involuntarily in a State facility need to not be cold, hungry, and sick because of obvious lacks in basic care offered.
When I first arrived in a dorm on Rikers, I didn’t have a blanket, cup or toothbrush. Attempting to ask a C.O. for any of these items resulted in responses ranging from “Haven’t got any. I rang but there are none” (for several days in a row) to “Well, you shouldn’t have come to jail then, should you?”
Often, these comments are delivered as screams in your face. The female C.O.s were some of the worst in that regard. During one circular trip to the Manhattan Criminal Court from Rikers Island for a court appearance, I saw three Correction Officers in a jail cell kicking the crap out of one prisoner who had taunted them. Two of the C.O.s assaulting the prisoner—who was no doubt mentally ill—were women. This scene took place in jail cells one floor beneath where the judges sit on their benches in the court.
People seem to forget that pretrial detainees are constitutionally “presumed innocent” until they are found guilty in a court of law.
It’s not as if diseases keep themselves to detainees only. The lack of primary health care products increase illness, which passes easily between detainees and Corrections Officers and others on the outside who have contact with the prisoners, such as visitors.
If you think about it, Rikers Island is a big breeding ground for illness and disease in New York City, funded by the State.
The self-defeating primary health care crisis at Rikers is a perfect metaphor of how the penal colony is destructive to society in general. Jail poisons the lives of an ‘undesirable’ segment of society while enabling us to forget about them by removing them from our gaze.
I can actually earn money outside, which will stop the current overall bleeding. This Catch-22 is what effectively disenfranchises the detained poor from adequate legal representation. Courts and trials are hard enough. Adding incarceration to that already full slate, with its accompanying issues of illness, mental and physical stress, the constant threat of physical and sexual violence, and we’re in a bad place all round.
I’d choose bail and my own resources to help a legal aid lawyer, over incarceration and a private lawyer any day. After all, there’s no point in “securing justice” if what crawls out of the cage at the end of the process is its abandoned, beaten shadow. And that’s the very real danger in all of this. I can feel jail destroying me, changing me.
Back In The Bullpens In Search Of Lower Bail
23 February 2007 — A long and painful day spent in the bullpen system between Rikers Island and the Manhattan Criminal Court. The object of all of this has been to get bail reduced to a manageable amount of around $2,000 from the original $8,000. This finally happened two days ago, during a similar trip to court.
The judge ruled that if we posted bail today and surrendered my passport1, I would be released. It was an amazing victory after almost a month spent in jail and a month incarcerated in the hospital before that. The Corrections Officers and lawyers present said I would be on the streets in a few hours or so. Of course, this process was not to go smoothly.
The ADA's Manipulation
After searching my home for several hours between the two court dates, a friend established that my passport was not there. The Assistant District Attorney’s office admitted—only on the second court date after my friend had spent hours frantically searching—that they already had the passport in their possession, from the raid on my home.
When going to pay bail, the friend made a Herculean effort at the window to pay, to be told for several hours that “the documentation is not here”. Back in the bullpen system by this time, with no access to information, I had no idea why bail wasn’t imminent and why I hadn’t been released. When I realized I was heading back for Rikers that night, the misery sunk in.
Back in the bullpens on Rikers, one African American inmate who introduces himself as “Wolf” questioned me about my experience of prison. A month into the experience, I had a lot to say to him, and he smiled as he realized that I was no believer in the penal system as it stood.
Bullpens may have been designed for efficiently sorting and and separating through large numbers of detainees, but they are being used for a whole different purpose. Add to that the chaos generated by lazy guards who leave people in pens to avoid end of shift work, and you are left in a hell of compressed, endless time, bottled anger, and potential violence.
Standing in a crowded cage with 50 or 100 exhausted and stressed-out men, who had been through an entire day in similar circumstances, and knowing your bed was only a few hundred yards away yet still being kept there needlessly for hours, you have to wonder what we are communicating to these constitutionally innocent men.
There is something fundamentally wrong about all of this institutionalized disrespect and negation that becomes its own crime, modeling to prisoners destructive ways of relating to others even as they are punished for the assumption that they have been doing the same thing.
Oppressive Victorian-era iron bars and walls. Time stopped. No clocks. People spending days in bullpens, dazed and confused, not knowing when they will be moved elsewhere or even where they are going. Desperate men pleading for toilet paper or water from uncaring Corrections Officers, who alternate negation with screaming.
People having to go to the bathroom in a toilet with no door or even stall walls in front of 100 people. Bullpen toilets full of sandwiches, not cleaned for weeks on end. Freezing, spit-colored stone floors and walls. Rows of bodies sleeping on stone cell floors like trestles on train tracks.
Claustrophobia from the stuffiness of cells. People freaking out and panicking from the undefined long periods of confinement. A desperately swirling crowd trying to avoid two men in the center who explode to tear each other down in a mini Thunderdome, with the crowd lost in raw emotions of expectation, excitement and fear.
“People outside,” Wolf tells me, “need to know how they treat us in here.” I look around and I can’t agree more. Society is burning lives in here, permanently twisting personalities, and keeping it all out of sight and out of mind.
Epilogue
I was finally bailed out of Rikers Island on Feb. 23, by an old friend, Ken Harper, who flew in from Colorado. Paying bail for someone is a process as fraught as that which goes on inside the walls, out of sight.
Ken got ataste of what was going on that evening. The computer at the Rikers Island bail office, across the bridge from Queens, had me listed in the computer as “sentenced”which of course was impossible, as there had been no trial or any admission of guilt. So there were delays.
We weren’t able to pay bail until 5:07 p.m. on Feb. 23, already over 24 hours after I had been told in court that I could pay bail and leave immediately, and over 24 hours after a friend had first tried, to be told that “the documentation hadn’t arrived.”
As I had been warned by my dorm mates on Rikers, these last 24 hours after the announcement were indeed “the longest day”. I didn’t actually get onto the streets of New York that night until well after 10:00 p.m.—over 5 hours after bail was paid and 10 hours after Ken had begun the process of paying bail. The State of New York supplied me with a free single-ride subway ticket.
It was yet another long trek through medical and regular bullpens on the island. The last person I saw on Rikers who I knew was another guy from my dorm—a large black guy called “UN.” He had some sage advice: “Yo shellshock—stay out of the Middle East, nigga.”
After the jail psychiatrist signed their final forms, I was returned to the intake bullpens.
I was DNA-ed in the intake area and, after an excruciating wait of another hour during which C.O.s taunted us with “I think there’s one last bus coming tonight but you might need to wait until tomorrow,” I was finally driven in a prison bus from the Island, over the bridge, to the exit center in Queens. We were not handcuffed for this journey. I had told Ken not to bother to wait after hearing that he had posted bail at 5pm, as it would no doubt take hours. I was right.
On the city bus to the subway, the only other prisoner released at the same time told me that the previous time he had spent on Rikers Island—for several months—was far easier to bear than this jail time, which was only for a couple of weeks. It had been a completely exhausting two months for me too. I was sick and tired.
A homeless guy interrupted my thoughts as he tried to beg from me. “Dude, I just got off Rikers,” I told him. “Oh! Sorry man! You have a good night,” he said, and took off. I didn’t ask him if he’d ever seen the inside of The Rock. I didn’t need to.
How It Ended
26 November 2007 — I was finally done with trips back and forth to New York at a final court appearance.
The verdict? No criminal record.
Photo Credits — Nigelparry.com, Joel Carillet, Correctionhistory.org, Flickr’s Creative Commons photographers Vidot, InSunlight, Accozzaglia, and Llima Orosa.
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