1.
Goodman: We’re on the road in Denver, Colorado,
but we turn right now to an exclusive interview with New Yorker staff writer
Jennifer Gonnerman about explosive video depicting violence inside New York
City’s Rikers Island jail. Rare surveillance camera footage obtained by The New
Yorker magazine shows a former teenage prisoner, Kalief Browder, being abused
on two separate occasions. In one clip from 2012, the teen is seen inside
Rikers’ Central Punitive Segregation Unit, better known as the Bing. As a guard
escorts Browder to the showers, Browder appears to speak, then the guard
suddenly violently hurls him to the floor, although he’s already handcuffed. In
a separate video clip from 2010, Kalief Browder is attacked by almost a dozen
other teenage prisoners after he punches a gang member who spat in his face.
The other prisoners pile onto Browder and pummel him until guards finally
intervene. Reporter Jennifer Gonnerman wrote about Browder for The New Yorker
last year and told his story on Democracy Now! in one of our most watched
interviews. She described how Browder spent nearly three years at Rikers,
arriving there as a 16-year-old high school sophomore, after he refused to
plead guilty to a crime he did not commit, he said. The crime? Stealing a backpack.
It was May 15, 2010, when Browder was walking home from a party with his
friends in the Bronx, and he was stopped by police based on a tip he had robbed
someone weeks earlier. He told HuffPost Live what happened next.
2.
Browder: They had searched me, and the guy
actually said—at first he said I robbed him. I didn’t have anything on me. And
that’s when—
3.
MARC LAMONT HILL: When you say “nothing,” you mean no weapon and
none of his property.
4.
Browder: No weapon, no money, anything he said
that I allegedly robbed him for. So the guy actually changed up his story and
said that I actually tried to rob him. But then another police officer came,
and they said that I robbed him two weeks prior. And then they said, “We’re
going to take you to the precinct, and most likely we’re going to let you go
home.” But then, I never went home.
5.
Goodman: Kalief Browder would be imprisoned for
the next almost three years, even though he was never convicted of any crime.
For nearly 800 days of that time, he was held in solitary confinement. The
teenager maintained his innocence, requested a trial, but was only offered a
plea deals while the trial was repeatedly delayed. Near the end of his time in
jail, the judge offered to sentence him to time served if he entered a guilty
plea, and told him he could face 15 years in prison if he was convicted. He
refused to accept the deal, maintaining his innocence. He was only released
when the case was suddenly dismissed. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has
cited Browder’s ordeal as a reason to, quote, “root out unnecessary case delay.”
In a statement to The New Yorker magazine, the mayor wrote, quote, “Kalief
Browder’s tragic story put a human face on Rikers Island’s culture of delay—a
culture with profound human and fiscal costs for defendants and our city,” he
wrote. Mayor de Blasio has recently launched a sweeping new plan to improve
conditions at Rikers. Well, for more, we’re joined by Jennifer Gonnerman, staff
writer for The New Yorker. Jennifer, welcome back to Democracy Now! I’d like to
start by first you telling us—setting the scene for us of this explosive video,
how rare it is to have video inside Rikers.
6.
Gonnerman: It’s unbelievably rare, as you know,
Amy. I mean, footage like this never, ever comes out. It’s not as if this was
shot by some kind of camera crew. This is what goes on when nobody is looking.
You know, nobody really knows what goes on in Rikers Island. Nobody really sees
it, except for the people who live there and the people who work there. So,
having footage like this is invaluable, and it just never, ever gets out like
this. It’s highly unusual.
7.
Goodman: So, would you narrate—because the video
is silent, would you narrate the first video of the guard coming to solitary
confinement where this teenager is, Kalief Browder?
8.
Gonnerman: Sure.
9.
Goodman: You see him outside of his prison cell,
the guard, flexing his muscles. Can you start there and narrate as we show it?
10.
Gonnerman: You know, so the correction officer
has come to Kalief Browder’s cell to take him to the shower, which is supposed
to be a daily occurrence. And on the way there, he appears to toss him or slam
him to the ground—and that’s what’s happening right here in the video—and hold
him down. And it’s unclear why exactly that’s happening. There’s no microphones
on these cameras. It looks like maybe Kalief said something. It’s uncertain. I
asked Kalief, “What happened here? What was going on?” And he told me that a
week or two prior they had had some sort of verbal dispute, an argument, and he
felt like this was probably just the way the officer was dealing with it. But
it came out of nowhere to Kalief. And, you know, I met Kalief about a year ago,
and he told me about this incident at that time. He told me the exact date that
it occurred. And he said, “You need to see the video.” And I didn’t think, you
know, of course, I was ever going to see the video. But the fact that he was so
adamant—and it wasn’t as if he wanted me to see it because it was the worst
thing that happened to him on Rikers Island, because it certainly wasn’t. It’s
just that he knew it had happened in full view of the cameras. And there was
something about that that was so blatant and so egregious that he just was sort
of very eager for people to know what had happened and for people to see it.
And it just struck me. Here he was in solitary confinement, and yet he
remembered, two years later, the exact date that this incident had occurred. And
actually, Amy, the most disturbing thing about this video, you can’t even see
in the video, but you alluded to it in the introduction, which is the fact that
when this happens, Kalief has now been in jail for 862 days without being
convicted of a crime. So he’s been trapped on Rikers Island for that long by
the time this happens, and he’s been about nine months in solitary confinement
at this point, barely ever leaving his cell. This is one of the few times he
ever leaves the cell, only to go to the court or to recreation or to a shower.
11.
Goodman: And how old was he at the time?
12.
Gonnerman: In this video, he’s 19 years old. He
was arrested at 16. And it’s just—this video is—
13.
Goodman: Why was he never tried—
14.
Gonnerman: You know, that’s something—
15.
Goodman: —over that three-year period?
16.
Gonnerman: Right. You know, that’s something
that I wrote about at length in The New Yorker last fall, and it has to do with
a congestion in the courts, particularly in the Bronx. He was arrested in the
Bronx. If you’re arrested there, the courts are slower than in the other
boroughs. But the case went on and on. And the real reason it dragged on for
three years, which is pretty unusual, but certainly not the only time this
happens in New York City, is because he insisted on a trial. Just like you
talked about in the introduction, he said he [was innocent]. He was not going
to plead guilty to something that he believed he had not done. He wanted his
trial. And he didn’t think it was going to take three years to get a trial; he
just wanted his day in court. And it never came. They kept doing all these
delays, over and over again.
17.
You know, my feeling is that the court system,
which decides how long he’s going to be locked up before trial, has really no
idea what’s happening in Rikers Island. So there’s these two systems that are
highly dysfunctional—the jail system and the court system. And here’s Kalief
bouncing between the two, each dysfunction exacerbating the—each system just
exacerbating the dysfunction of the other system. You know, it’s completely
crazy.
18.
Goodman: Jennifer, you just described the video
that we saw. And by the way, how did you get this video?
19.
Gonnerman: You know, I can’t really get into how
I got it, except just to say that it is city footage. The city has this
footage. They shot it with surveillance cameras in their own facilities.
20.
Goodman: Have these three—was it three guards,
the first one and then the other two that joined in? Have they been
disciplined?
21.
Gonnerman: I don’t know. The city has had this
footage for more than a day now, but I don’t know if there’s been any
discipline. I know they said they’re looking into it, into the incidents.
22.
Goodman: Well, presumably, they’ve always had
it, right? It’s a prison video.
23.
Gonnerman: Well, they have, of course, of
course. But, you know, having it and watching it and scrutinizing it isn’t, you
know, always the same.
24.
Goodman: Right. Let’s go to the second video,
the video that was two years earlier in 2010. Describe it for us as we play it.
Again, it is silent.
25.
Gonnerman: You know, in this video—here we go.
You started the video where Kalief—you can’t see Kalief in the screen here,
because he’s being sort of pummeled, kicked and beaten by, I don’t know, eight
or 10 different inmates. But this is a—he’s in a housing unit in the adolescent
jail on Rikers Island. He’s been locked up for six months. He’s 17 years old in
this video. The housing unit is run by a gang. He, in an earlier incident,
tells me that he was spit in the face. A gang leader spit in his face. He was
so angry about this that he later punched the gang leader, knowing full well
what would happen, and this is exactly what happened. The entire housing unit
starts to jump on him. So, right now in the video, the officers have pulled
most of the teenagers off of Kalief, though a lot of the teenagers are trying
to break free of the guards and get some extra punches in, as you’re seeing
right there. The officers are pulling them back, pulling them back, trying to
protect Kalief as best they can, though they’re completely outmatched. And
there, you see, they’ve put him in a sort of safe room, and yet the other
inmates have burst in and now are pummeling and punching him and beating him up
once again. So it’s sort of like one against 10, or one against eight, and the
officers are clearly trying to do the best they can, I think, but there’s not
much they can do when they’re so outmatched. In this part of the video, I think
you can see an officer has a canister of pepper spray, and he’s trying to get
the other inmates off of Kalief. But it’s essentially a very protracted
beatdown of one inmate. And here’s Kalief alone, you know, looking as one would
have after [inaudible]—
26.
Goodman: Jennifer, it’s—
27.
Gonnerman: —seriously attacked.
28.
Goodman: It is astounding that Kalief Browder,
as a 16-year-old, went through this for three years. This is Kalief speaking on
HuffPost Live’s Marc Lamont Hill that while he was in—he was telling him, while
he was in solitary confinement at Rikers, the guards often refused to give him
his meals.
29.
Browder: If you say anything that could tick
them off any type of way, some of them, which is a lot of them, what they do is
they starve you. They won’t feed you. And it’s already hard in there, because
if you get the three trays that you get every day, you’re still hungry, because
I guess that’s part of the punishment. So, if they starve you one tray, that
could really make an impact on you. And—
30.
MARC LAMONT HILL: How much were you starved?
31.
Browder: I was starved a lot. I can’t even—I can’t
even count.
32.
Goodman: Kalief Browder went on to say he was
once starved four times in a row—no breakfast, lunch, dinner or breakfast again.
As we begin to wrap up, Jennifer, can you talk about how he is doing today?
33.
Gonnerman: You know, he’s out. He’s been out for
two years now. And I guess he’s doing as well as one could possibly do,
considering what he’s been through. But, you know, the psychological damage,
the emotional damage—I wrote about it last year, last fall, in The New
Yorker—continues to this day, continues after the story comes out, of course,
and it goes on and on. And, you know, it’s unclear at this point what it’s going
to mean down the road. But, you know, he’s doing OK. He’s in college. He’s
trying to gain back the education that he missed, because he missed two years
of high school while he was locked up on Rikers Island.
34.
Goodman: I want to thank you for being with us,
staff writer for The New Yorker. We will link to all of your stories at The New
Yorker magazine. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace
Report. When we come back, today is the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian
genocide.
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