Is Rikers Island a Death Trap?
Jason Johnson: This is a word, a podcast from Slate. I’m your host, Jason Johnson. Many of us look at the nation’s jails and prisons as dangerous places for those who are held there. But advocates say conditions at New York’s Rikers Island are literally killing prisoners, even those who are guilty of nothing.
Olayemi Olurin: Rikers is a war zone. Rikers is a place where PTSD goes to thrive because all of the people being incarcerated there, they are going through violence, just pure violence, and not just from incarcerated people, but often from the corrections officers themselves.
Jason Johnson: The crisis at Rikers Island coming up on a word with me, Jason Johnson. Stay with us. Welcome to a Word, a podcast about race and politics and everything else. I’m your host, Jason Johnson. The Rikers Island jail complex in New York is notorious for its brutality and danger for inmates. Just this year, at least 18 people have died at Rikers, some killed at the hands of other inmates, some by suicide, and others from medical neglect. Years of promises to improve conditions have gone unfulfilled. And advocates are pressing the city officials to follow through on plans to close the facility. But how did the crisis at Rikers Island get so bad and why political efforts to fix it failed? Joining us to talk about it is Olayemi Olurin. She’s a public defender with the Legal Aid Society and a frequent commentator on judicial issues. Olayemi, welcome to a word.
Olayemi Olurin: Thank you for having me.
Jason Johnson: What’s actually going on at Rikers right now? Like, why are people dying there?
Olayemi Olurin: Because of depraved indifference and mismanagement. That’s honestly the truth. Rikers is a place that’s reputation precedes it. And honestly, I think to its detriment, because its reputation precedes it. People think it’s this really infamous, terrible jail for terrible convicted criminals. But in actuality, Rikers is a pretrial detention center, and that shocks most people to find out. And you wouldn’t think that a place has been open since 1932. People don’t have that information, and that’s deliberately concealed because these people have not had a trial. They’re being held pretrial simply because they do not have the money for bail. And if people realize that more often than, say, in a city of almost 10 million people, where the 42% of the people are white, why is this pretrial detention center? Over 90% of the people being held black and brown people, simply because they haven’t had a trial and they don’t have the money to purchase their freedom.
Jason Johnson: Just to give us a larger context here, how many people at any given week are being held at Rikers Island? Like how big is the prison complex?
Olayemi Olurin: So Rikers, the facility itself was built to hold only 3000 people, but right now, more than 5000 people are being held there. And that’s why if you’ve seen the photos, people are literally stacked on top of each other. They’re holding people in shower stalls that they’ve turned into cells. People died last year. Several of the people in the six deaths that happened last year, there are people just confined to their wheelchair for ten days at a time and intake because there’s nowhere to put them. So really piling bodies on top of one another.
Jason Johnson: What is sort of the daily difficulties and health conditions that prisoners at Rikers are facing every day?
Olayemi Olurin: So the medical neglect at Rikers is extreme in some of the worst in the country. I think around May, they had determined that more than 12,000 medical appointments for people incarcerated there have been missed in entirety because the corrections officers are not choosing to take them to those medical appointments. So I would say Rikers is a war zone. Rikers is a place where PTSD goes to thrive because all of the people being incarcerated there, they are going through violence, just pure violence, and not just from incarcerated people, but often from the corrections officers themselves is an important note to know that most allegations of sexual abuse and violence made in pre-trial detention centers and prisons and local jails all across the country are mostly made against the correctional officers themselves. When there was a period of time when the corrections officers weren’t there, we saw drug overdoses go down, The amount of drugs that were coming in and out of Rikers go down, and the incidents of brutality and violence and force also went down. So the corrections officers play a significant role and the abuse is happening there.
Olayemi Olurin: And I think a beautiful example of that is earlier this year, just a few months ago, there was an incident where a corrections officer shot and killed an 18 year old in the Bronx who had sprayed him with a toy water gun. And a lesser known fact that was publicized about that was that officer, that corrections officer, that that was actually the officer in charge of training. The other corrections officer was at Rikers and he’s been in charge and responsible for that for a decade now. Something that specifically came up that when that happens was this does not reflect the Department of Corrections and the other corrections officers. But how couldn’t it how couldn’t it when this is the person who trains them? So a lot of that is what’s happening. And right now, they’re actually in the middle of doing a report that’s supposed to come out about the brutality and the violence that’s happening at Rikers. But the Department of Corrections and those pushed to have it sealed.
Olayemi Olurin: Another example of what’s actually happening inside. Earlier this year, one of the men that died, his name was Herman Diaz. He choked on an orange, and the other incarcerated people tried to help him. They were there’s a video. It’s completely recorded. He is choking and all the incarcerated people are trying to get him help. They’re screaming for the guards to help. And the guards are just standing there looking. So that’s an example of the kind of things that are happening there. And they allowed him to die. He died.
Jason Johnson: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back, more on prisoner deaths at Rikers. This is a word with Jason Johnson. Stay tuned.
Jason Johnson: This is Jason Johnson, host of A Word, Slate’s podcast about race and politics and everything else. I want to take a moment to welcome our new listeners. If you’ve discovered a word and like what you hear, please subscribe, rate and review. Wherever you listen to podcasts and let us know what you think by writing us at a word at Slate.com.
Jason Johnson: Thank you. You’re listening to a word with Jason Johnson. Today, we’re talking about the deaths of prisoners at New York’s Rikers Island with public defender Olayemi O’Leary. So there’s one name that I think even your average person on the street who’s never been in a tri state area recognizes and associates with. That’s a Rikers and that’s Kalief Browder. Can you remind our audience like who Kalief Browder was and what actually happened to him?
Olayemi Olurin: For life, Browder was a 16 year old that was falsely accused of stealing a backpack and held at Rikers Island for, I want to say, over two years. And they kept him also in solitary confinement during that time. And when he was finally released from Rikers Island, the psychological trauma of that experience never escaped him. And years after he took his own life, his his case is actually what kind of launched the campaign to close Rikers.
Olayemi Olurin: So the campaign to close Rikers began in 2016. And the idea was we want Rikers to be closed by the year 2026. That was the original plan. They wanted to decrease rate Rikers. They wanted to bring the population of Rikers down to at least 3300. That’s still overcapacity, but that tells you how many more people are being held there. So the plan was to lower the population at Rikers so that we could eventually get it closed, which is exactly kind of how bail reform came about.
Olayemi Olurin: And the problems have been is that one de Blasio, although he signed on for the campaign to close Rikers, he wanted to do it in exchange for creating four more jails, which is not a good idea. Taking one depraved institution and replacing before it doesn’t do anything to stop the issues. But two, they have delayed. They’ve already said that there are delays and the pushback back to the campaign to close Rikers till 2027. But now we have Eric Adams in office who is doing his just ever best to not only oppose bail reform, oppose closing the capital, close Rikers, but also opposing federal receivership. And just about any and everything that has been suggested to slow the deaths and the incarceration at Rikers.
Jason Johnson: One of the things that strikes me about this sort of insular political environment of New York and New York state and your city is, you know, you had a gubernatorial candidate who ran on a you know, crime is out of control. That person lost. But New York City itself still has a mayor, Eric Adams, who very much beats the drums about out of control crime. How does the fact that New York currently has a mayor who presents himself as tough on crime make it more difficult to address some of the reforms or the things that need to change at Rikers Island.
Olayemi Olurin: First of all, Eric Adams is a cop and he reminds us of that each and every single day. And that’s important to remember. That’s why if you see things, he was a transit cop and specific. So it’s not a coincidence that the moment he came into office, he directed all his attention, his ire at the subways. Let’s add a thousand more cops to the subway, less sensationalise the subways is terribly horrifying. Scary place. Something that’s important to remember is if your own mayor is constantly fearmongering about crime and alarming everybody and convincing everybody, that is a dangerous time, it’s going to legitimize that. This is a place, New York City, when they focus on New York City and making it out to be Gotham City, we put more money into policing and incarceration and all of these. So quote unquote, tough on crime than anybody else. So if you’re continuing to highlight us as the source of lawlessness, is that not an evidence of how your approach has continued to fail?
Jason Johnson: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back, more about the crisis at New York’s Rikers Island with Attorney Olayemi Olurin. This is a word with Jason Johnson. Stay tuned. You’re listening to a word with Jason Johnson today. We’re talking about deaths at Rikers Island with a limaye Olurin of the Legal Aid Society. So there are 18 people as of now that have passed away at Rikers in 2022 alone. Can you just tell us a little something about some of these people, some of their stories that have been lost in the ether that that the world really needs to hear about?
Olayemi Olurin: Someone whose story recently stood out to me, one of the most recent incarcerated deaths at Rikers. He was being held in the mental health unit and they gave him a razor blade. The corrections officers, they gave it to him. And this is on video. They give him a razor blade and he slit his throat and they stand there. Three corrections officers, one in which it was a captain, stood there for 10 minutes and watched that man bleed out.
Jason Johnson: When this was investigated, what the hell did the cops say that kept them from doing anything when the guy slit his own throat?
Olayemi Olurin: I’m glad you asked. All right. So earlier this year, when Herman Diaz died choking on the orange, he was one of several deaths and there were three deaths back to back in the space of a week in June. And when that happened, they all happened because there were corrections officers that stood there and did nothing. This is a trend. Right. And after this happens, one of the deaths, a man, he hung himself in the cell and he didn’t immediately die, but he was pretty much dead right on him, but in a vegetative state. And he’s in the hospital. So then Eric Adams, our good cop mayor, doesn’t report it as an in-custody death. And so that delayed the Department of Justice’s investigation. Right. Gives them time to do whatever they need to do in the interim, once it’s found out that this wasn’t in-custody death and the step was delayed, that was a cover up. Eric Adams goes and responds. My understanding is a place of death is where they died.
Olayemi Olurin: And then in all the backlash for these corrections officers, Eric Adams responds by going to Rikers not to lend his support to the incarcerated people or their families. No, no, no, no. He goes to the corrections officers in support and he goes, I want you to know I am proud of you. I am proud of you. They want to shame you. I. I am proud of you.
Olayemi Olurin: So when you ask how is this allowed to go on? Why are they receiving any kind of punishment or backlash is because they have a mayor and a commissioner that protect them because they don’t have a problem with how the system is working. And that’s just the truth. All of these different abuses that you hear about, like even take a Kalief Browder, Glueck Browder, half of what was so psychologically traumatizing them was being held in solitary confinement. So we passed a law to ban that outlaw this practice, and yet they continue to do it. When chastised and criticized for this abuse. If this known, you know, if the world has gotten on board with nothing else, they’re on board with the fact that what happened to Kalief Browder was wrong and inhumane. All kind of people that don’t find themselves to be as far in the laughter as advocates or abolitionists like me feel for what happened. Actually, Browder and Eric Adams response them continuing to use solitary confinement against the people incarcerated at Rikers was is not solitary confinement. It’s it’s restrictive housing.
Jason Johnson: In the state of New York. Are there other prisons that are slightly less awful? Like what’s the likely process that you would face where Rikers is is your worst option?
Olayemi Olurin: Honestly, they’re all bad. We focus on Rikers because Rikers is the main place, the main pretrial detention center where they send you. So Rikers is pretty much where you’re going to be. But the things that are happening at Rikers are happening at not only jails in New York City as well, but as happened in Harris County is happening in Cook County, is happening. Like last year, they declared Rikers a human rights crisis when we had 16 deaths. That was the highest death toll since 2013 and we’re already at 18 deaths this year. Texas Harris County has 21 deaths for the year. Rikers isn’t even the most. That’s right. Rikers is in the most deaths. What’s happening in Rikers is symptomatic of what’s happening at pre-trial detention centers all around the country.
Olayemi Olurin: You know, something I was studying the other day is of the thousands of people that commit suicide because suicide is the highest cause of death in jails and in prisons. And that is a reflection of what they’re being forced to endure. I want to say like over 70% of suicides in local jails and prisons occur by people who are they’re held for not more than a week. So think about what you’re experiencing and what tragedy and what’s happening that in a week of being held at a place you take your own life.
Jason Johnson: Let’s say Rikers does get shut down, right? Let’s say it gets shut down in 2026 or 2027. Is that really going to make a difference in the kind of abuse that men and women are facing in prison? Is shutting down Rikers really going to lead to any change other than the abuse just not happening in one location?
Olayemi Olurin: It’s completely insufficient to say, all right, close Rikers and then nothing else or close Rikers and let’s open up more things. There must be a larger, larger picture. But I will say this. Since we passed landmark bail reform in in New York City from the top of 2020 to now, there have been let around, I say, over 200,000 people that have been able to fight their cases just out. So those are a bunch of people that were not subjected to the trauma and abuses of being held. Right. Or being incarcerated or possibly their lives. And I think about those people you have to remember is like. These are all real people.
Olayemi Olurin: I held a Rikers rally earlier this year in February. And as I’m, you know, calling out the names of the different people that have passed away in Rikers last year, I got to Steven Kundu, which is a 12th person that passed away at Rikers last year. The minute I said his name, his mom cried out from the audience. I didn’t even know she was at the rally. And she comes out and she tells the story of how her son died. And they didn’t even bother to give her son her son a name, you know? It’s just, oh, the 12th death. And, you know, there is a lady in Cook County who I met earlier this year who her husband died in Rikers. And she’s like, they don’t give him a name, but maybe give him a name. These are real people.
Olayemi Olurin: Right. So even though, you know, it’s easy to say, will it eradicate all of the things in the system, it’s not going to free all 2 million people that are incarcerated. It’s not going to free all 400,000 people that are being held pretrial. There’s still going to be people that are being turned throughout the system and experience all kinds of abuses. But the thing is, you never get to see the lives you save, right? Like in a world where we didn’t have Rikers, you wouldn’t know even could do as a home, home alive. You know what I mean? To be able to take that victory and take that when you don’t know all the names of the people whose lives have been spared. And see because you don’t know what would have happened to them. So I say, you know, closing Rikers would save would have saved all of the lives that we’ve lost this year or to save all the lives that we lost last year. And unfortunately, there’s almost not a time I’ve ever talked about Rikers that shortly after I don’t hear about another death. So it also would save all the people whose lives are unfortunately still going to be lost to it.
Olayemi Olurin: So, yes, it makes it makes it change. But there’s nothing that can be done in a vacuum. It is always woefully insufficient to leave it there. Advocacy must be done for the larger, broader issue. People have to realize, Hey, what’s happening at Rikers? It’s not that Rikers is not the walls. In the spirit of Rikers that’s especially heinous. It’s this practice is how we’re using pretrial detention centers and jails and weaponising it all around this country. So you’re right. We need to do more. We have to have a totality type of approach. And if there’s a tree, right, if there is a tree and all the different arms of a tree, the police, the judges, the prosecutors, the prisons, all of these different things are, you know, bad arms of one big sick, rotten tree. We can’t just focus on one branch. Right. And leave the rest of the tree, the rest of the structure standing. So we’ve got to look at it at all. You’re right.
Jason Johnson: What do you say to individuals that you meet in the community? Obviously, politicians have their own motivation, but what do you say to people who are like, look, it’s a prison. Most of these people have committed a crime. I don’t need prisons to be nice places. I don’t need prisons to be super sanitary. This is a place for punishment. How do you respond to people who say that when they hear bad things about Rikers and like, Hey, this person burglarize somebody’s home, they beat somebody up, they mug them. That’s kind of what they deserve.
Olayemi Olurin: First of all, we live in a country where we’re supposed to have a presumption of innocence, so nobody here has actually been convicted of a crime. The purpose of bail is to ensure somebody returns to court. It is a popular misconception that’s peddled to us in the media that bail is there to keep us safe, that they’ve decided that this person is a danger to the public. That’s not true. Bail is just something that is set. And if you’re poor, you don’t have the money to pay for it. And if you’re not, then you go free. And that’s why we have an entire criminal system built up of only poor people. The amount of people in our criminal system is not a reflection of the amount of people that are bad people are doing crime or endangering us. It’s a reflection of how many poor people are in our system and unable to fight the system that’s being levied against them. So that’s the first thing.
Olayemi Olurin: As people, we all have emotions, we all have impulse desires. And when you are educated and brought up in a society that treats justice and punishment and prosecution as synonymous, it’s easy to think, Oh, you did something bad. Justice is to punish and abuse that person. But something what you need to remember is everybody that you’re funneling in and out of the criminal system comes back to you. So if you’re taking what are the most under-resourced communities, the communities that have the same plights and problems that have waged for generations after generations, and you’re saying, hey, that poor person right there, that person already dealing with all kinds of social ills, let me put them in prison and or jail and make them fight for their lives, expose them to all of those social ills, but in a magnitude of ways and every other psychological collateral consequence that will come with that.
Olayemi Olurin: But on top of that, all of the fines and debts and everything else that’s saddled with it, all you’re guaranteeing is that those people go back into those communities and show them what they experienced in prison. So at the end of the day, you’re only hurting you. So it all comes back to us. I say let’s say, you know, rise above your your short term impulse to be punitive and think about what’s going to be better for us in the long run. Because at the end of the day, we’ve been doing this approach for generation after generation and exact same communities in the same position as yesteryear.
Jason Johnson: Olayemi Olurin is an advocate, commentator and public defender with the Legal Aid Society in New York. Thanks so much for joining us on a word today.
Olayemi Olurin: Thank you.
Jason Johnson: And that’s a word for this week.
Jason Johnson: The show’s email is a word at Slate.com. This episode was produced by Kristie Taiwo Makanjuola. Ben Richmond is Slate’s senior director of operations for podcasts. Alicia montgomery is the vice president of Audio. Our theme music was produced by Don Will. I’m Jason Johnson. Tune in next week for Word.
