Credit Photograph by Richard Perry/The New York
Times/Redux
In this week’s New Yorker, I wrote about a
sixteen-year-old boy from the Bronx named Kalief Browder, who was accused
of robbery and confined on Rikers Island. He stayed there for three years,
waiting for a trial that never happened. For the majority of that time, he was
in solitary confinement, locked in a cell all day every day, with little to do
besides read, sleep, mark the time until his next court date, and listen
through a vent to his mentally ill neighbor talking to himself. On Sunday, the Times
reported that the New York City Department of Correction is planning to eliminate solitary confinement for sixteen- and
seventeen-year-olds by the end of 2014. This decision marks the most
significant step yet taken by the New York City jails commissioner Joseph Ponte
to “end the culture of excessive solitary confinement,” which was the promise
he made six months ago, when Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed him.
In recent years, jail and prison systems elsewhere in
the country have reduced their use of solitary confinement, but New York City
moved in the opposite direction. The total number of solitary-confinement beds
grew by sixty per cent between 2007 and 2013. And in early August, the office
of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York released a
devastating report in which it criticized jail officials for using solitary “to
manage and control disruptive adolescents” by locking them in cells for
twenty-three hours a day, “at an alarming rate and for excessive periods of
time.”
Browder was one of these adolescents; between 2010
and 2013, he spent about two years in solitary. Most often, he was imprisoned
in Rikers’s main solitary-confinement unit, which is officially called the
Central Punitive Segregation Unit, but which everyone on Rikers refers to as
the Bing. The Bing has four hundred cells, laid out along two-story tiers, each
cell about twelve feet by seven. Bing inmates rarely step out of their cells
except to go to court, to the shower, or to the visit room. Bing inmates are
supposed to be allowed to go outside for an hour of recreation every day. But,
as Browder explained to me, this wasn’t really the way it worked, at least not
in the time that he was there.
For Bing inmates, “rec” took place outdoors, in an empty
twenty-two-by-eleven-foot metal cage, each inmate locked in by himself, with
nothing to do except shout to other prisoners and count the weeds. Many Bing
inmates skipped it, since they had to be standing at their cell door at around
5:30 A.M. in order to flag down an officer when he walked by. “You take a step
away from your cell door to use the bathroom, and you just see a shadow speed
walk by. Then you go to the door, and you try to tell him you want to go to the
yard, and he’ll say, ‘I passed your cell already,’ ” Browder told me. “I used
to say to myself, What’s the point of putting up with that? I’m just going to
go to sleep.”
In the past six months, I spent hours listening to
Browder describe his days in the Bing. He was arrested for robbery in the
spring of 2010, ten days before his seventeenth birthday, when a stranger
pointed him and his friend out to the police, accusing the pair of robbing him
a week or two earlier. Browder insisted that he was not guilty, refused
multiple plea offers, and finally had his case dismissed—but only after he had
endured more than a thousand days on Rikers. Even though I had written about
the Bing in the past, and visited it some fifteen years ago, I found many of
the stories Browder told me about his time in solitary not only deeply
disturbing but also surprising.
Browder’s experience was not so unusual, though. A
July report by the Board of Correction, which monitors conditions in New York
City’s jails, found that less than ten per cent of the Bing’s prisoners went
outside on any given day. “While some prisoners are passing up the opportunity
to participate in recreation—principally because there is virtually nothing to
do outside other than stand around—many more prisoners never even have the
opportunity to decide whether or not to go outside,” the report stated.
Then there was the matter of phone calls. Browder
said that Bing inmates got one six-minute call a day. If you called your mother
or your girlfriend or your lawyer, and the call went straight to voicemail, too
bad; there was no second call. You had to wait until the next day, when the
officer brought you the phone once again. During one of his stays in the Bing,
Browder told me, there was an officer who he’d clashed with who would taunt him
through the cell window. “He never used to let me use the phone,” Browder said.
But then, one day, he came to the door and said, “Do you want to use the phone
today? Enjoy your phone call.”
At first, Browder didn’t think anything was amiss.
Then he tried to call his mom, and discovered that he could not get through. It
seemed that somebody had reprogrammed her number. Instead of his mother’s
voice, he heard someone “asking me about what DVDs I wanted to order.” He
recalls, “It got me mad, because we get one phone call a day, and I wasted the
phone call calling—I think it was Netflix.” Afterward, he says, the officer
came to his cell window once again: “He was like a little kid, coming to my
cell. ‘Did you like your phone call?’”
Again, Browder wasn’t the only inmate who had this
experience. A new
report by the Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit organization that represents
poor defendants, recounts similar tales. “Lacquan, a 20-year-old client with a
history of mental illness, discovered on multiple occasions that correction
officers had reprogrammed his mother’s phone number to fast-food restaurants,”
the report states. “When Lacquan protested, they would taunt him and then tell
him that his phone call was over.”
Jail officials say that there are now fifty-one
inmates in solitary confinement between sixteen and seventeen years old. By
January 1st, that number should be down to zero, if jail officials follow
through on their promise. Meanwhile, the months that Browder spent locked in
the Bing left him with his own theories about the power dynamics of solitary.
In his view, its very setup insured that guards who wanted to dole out extra
punishment to inmates—deprive them of the phone or rec or even food—could get
away with it. Among the general jail population, Browder said, “they’ll do
their job, because they know the inmates will jump on them. But in solitary
confinement, they know everybody is locked in, so they curse at us, they talk
disrespectful to us, because they know we can’t do nothing.”
Jennifer Gonnerman joined The New Yorker as a staff
writer in 2015.
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