It’s a short trip across a bridge to get to a 413-acre parcel of landfill — Rikers Island, New York City’s most notorious lockup — situated like a 19th-century penal colony in the middle of the East River. Ranked as one of the 10 worst correctional facilities in the US, inmates there await being shipped to a federal prison for long stretches, or are short-timers doing what’s called “City Time.”
One former Rikers resident, the disgraced septuagenarian film producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, who had been awaiting trial on sex crimes charges, claimed the Big Apple’s pen was rotten to the core. He sued the city in November for $5 million, charging “deplorable conditions” there where he feared for his life.
Now David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan — both of whom spent time in Rikers — have collaborated to write “City Time, On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island,” (New York University Press), an expose about life at the nearly century-old Rikers, the island that once served as a military training ground during the Civil War, and today has a view of LaGuardia’s runways and the Mets home ground, Citi Field.
Arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2016, Shanahan served a brief Rikers sentence and wrote a historical study of the prison after his release, while Campbell, convicted in 2018 of “brawling” at an anti-fascist protest, served a year of city time. Their book reveals first-hand accounts of the brutality and banality of everyday Rikers life.
“The violence and utter meaninglessness of short-stay incarceration is reflected in every facet of city time. The crushing boredom that suffuses daily life is symptomatic of a social order that simply has no use for the people locked up there — in a dangerous, disgusting place that will leave them worse off than when they entered,” write the authors.
Both college-educated and heterosexual, they luckily avoided the violence that accompanies Rikers trans and gay sexual subculture. But becoming inmates assigned a prison number and jailhouse garb was bad enough — making them feel “loss and mortification.”
On day one, recall the authors, Rikers’ intake area consisted of filthy pens where new prisoners were herded in next to putrid and non-flushable toilets, along with the sickly polluted air — “odors of sweat, feet, piss, shit, burps, farts and bleach.” Stripping to their underwear, Shanahan and Campbell, like all other Rikers’ guests, had to hover over a chair that could detect metal contraband stored internally — that’s even before the actual physical strip search began.
Inmates must then change into ill-fitting forest green jumpsuits and flat-bottomed Velcro footwear before being escorted into the intake dormitory furnished with stationary single beds with deflated, flimsy mattresses. There are 28 rectangular dormitories in all containing a total of 1,850 beds — “massive open rooms,” write the authors. Each dormitory is the size of a basketball court — with both crawling cockroaches as well as correctional officers patrolling the perimeter.
A 6-foot-wide corridor dubbed “Broadway” bisects the dorm with six rows of rusted iron bed frames three feet apart and bolted to the floor on either side of the main thoroughfare. Limited hygiene standards prohibited naked showering and inmates are required to cover themselves when using the toilet. Foul odors and grotesque sights only add to the loss of privacy.
Racial and ethnic tensions simmered unchecked, but gang members help correctional officers keep temperatures down. With so many inmates serving time for stealing, the dorms’ population felt to the authors like a convention of boosters.
They describe how one inmate had been caught lifting nail polish from CVS in large quantities and then selling it to a Chinatown nail salon. Another recounted filling his bag with Haagen-Daz in a Midtown Manhattan market and selling it to bodegas in Harlem for two dollars a carton. Duane Reade’s surveillance footage nailed him stealing more than $1,000 worth and he was charged with grand theft. To him, however, Rikers was like a stay at The Ritz — he normally lived at a dangerously crime-riddled New York homeless shelter.
“Unsanitary conditions are the law of the land on Rikers,” write the authors. Meals were barely edible. Mold, roaches and even decomposing mice often ended up on dinner trays. Bread, bone dry and tasteless, was set on the table wrapped in white paper chewed by mice, and rats lived in the kitchen along with a squirrel inhabiting one of the bread-making machines. Chicken, either undercooked or overcooked, produced diarrhea, and water in the kitchen sometimes ran brown or black.
Sex — or the lack of it — is on everyone’s mind at Rikers, writes the authors, and gossip often spreads about sex with female correctional officers. The now strict rule of wearing underwear while bathing recalled instances of furtive sexual activity in the showers.
Drugs are also rampant.
K2, which mimics THC, is easily smuggled into Rikers — as is heroin, which can be sprayed on a sheet of paper mailed in an envelope — being colorless, odorless, tasteless. Tobacco is second in popularity with a pack of cigarettes selling for as much as $1,000. Tobacco rolled in a page from the Bible and the width of a match sells for $10-$20, the authors reveal.
Along with professional shoplifters, the authors’ fellow inmates ranged from bank robbers, drunk drivers, wife beaters, drug dealers, felony assaulters, and various types of petty criminals. Half of the 6,000 inmates usually served 30-days or less of city time mostly for theft and drug possession.
“These tragic men were caught in an unending cycle of poverty, substance abuse, mental illness and bad decisions, whose only agenda seemed to escape reality by getting high and supporting this habit by any means necessary,” write the authors. And they only got out of bed for their daily dose of methadone.
And there were the violent gang members — Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings, and the Folk Nation. “There is little to do in Rikers in comparison to state prisons, and finding creative ways to stave off the ever-encroaching boredom and cabin fever quickly becomes a priority,” write the authors.
How to make the time tolerable and go by quickly is the name of the card game, playing spades and rummy. Dice, banned at Rikers, are crafted from soap and toilet paper.
The authors soon learned that the most popular books coming through the mail featured graphic drug dealing, violence, and sex. Pocket bibles supplied rolling papers for weed instead of God’s word. The Post proved popular for news on the outside, read by guards and then salvaged from the trash by inmates.
As with the inmates, there are strict rules for Rikers’ visitors, write the authors. Rikers’ visitors are subjected to invasive searches by aggressive correction officers for smuggled contraband, and inmates are ordered to cease and desist from groping.
Despite endless city efforts at reform, existence in these crowded city time dormitories is hellish and toxic. Around the clock, there is the threat of violence, the lack of privacy, the incessant open air bodily functions and inherent foul odors, and the constant grotesque sights. As the authors observe, life in Rikers is “a ceaseless dull irritation and always threatening to explode.”
